The Internet Monk Archives

Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science. A review of the book by Mike “Science Mike” McHargue. Part 5.

Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

• Part 5

• • •

So when Mike returned home I imagine his conversation with his wife went something like this:

Mike: Hi, honey I’m home.

Jenny: Hi, honey, how were your conferences?

Mike: Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. Which do want first?

Jenny: I guess… the bad news.

Mike: In my left brain I’m still an atheist.

Jenny: And the good news?

Mike: In my right brain I’m a Christian.

Jenny: Wait… What?????

As a matter of fact, there is a neurological basis for what Mike was experiencing. Although, as we learned in our examination of Minds, Brains, Souls, and Gods, the whole left brain—right brain thing gets overblown in popular media; there is still something to it . The brain’s right hemisphere controls the muscles on the left side of the body, while the left hemisphere controls the muscles on the right side of the human body. In general, the left hemisphere is dominant in language: processing what you hear and handling most of the duties of speaking. It’s also in charge of carrying out logic and exact mathematical computations. When you need to retrieve a fact, your left brain pulls it from your memory. The right hemisphere is mainly in charge of spatial abilities, face recognition and processing music. It performs some math, but only rough estimations and comparisons. The brain’s right side also helps us to comprehend visual imagery and make sense of what we see. It plays a role in language, particularly in interpreting context and a person’s tone.

The two halves of our brains communicate via a thick channel of nerves called the corpus callosum. In the 1960s neurosurgeons attempted to treat severe epilepsy by severing the corpus callosum. At first the patients seemed to respond positively but then a strange phenomenon occured known as Alien Hand Syndrome.

A patient tried to hug his wife with his right hand; and his left hand threw a punch. Another patient was trying to pick out a sensible dress for work, when her left hand picked out a louder print. So the researchers devised an experiment that would allow them to communicate with each half of the brain in isolation. With a careful combination of special glasses, monitors, and positioning, the researchers could present questions in such a way that only half the patient’s brain could see them. They then left Scrabble tiles on the table within easy reach of the left hand; because the right brain basically can’t speak.

Dr. Michio Kaku interviewed neuroscientists about these such experiments in his book The Future of the Mind. What follows can only be described as freaky. One subject was asked what he wanted to be when he graduated. He said he want to be a draftsman; very practical occupation. But when they asked his right brain, his left hand spelled our automobile racer! The two halves of his brain had different agendas and goals for the future, but they were living in the same skull! And Mike recounts this:

Another patient was asked what he believed about God. His left brain spoke and said he was an atheist, but his right brain said he was a believer. An atheist and a believer coexisting in the same skull. Two halves of the same brain matter, flesh and blood. So does half of a person’s soul go to heaven and the other to hell? Does Jesus live in only half of a person’s heart?

Many of us can relate to this paradoxical experience. Have you ever prayed fervently while simultaneously wondering if anyone was hearing that prayer? Have you offered someone comfort in faith, while wondering if you believed anything you were saying? For all its bizarreness, the phenomenon of split-brain patients gives me strange comfort. Suddenly, I don’t feel so weird for identifying with both skeptical and spiritual people. There is an atheist in my brain who remains wholly incredulous about the idea of a divine being who once dwelt among us in the form of a man.

There is a Christian in my brain who is indescribably and enduringly comforted by the idea and love of a supernatural Savior. I’ve stopped trying to deny, starve, or otherwise do away with either of them. I let my atheist question and examine. I let him check my motives and search for ideas that can be proven. Atheist Mike contemplates ethical issues from all angles, where right and wrong emerge not from ancient texts, but from the relation between our actions and the suffering or consent of others. Christian Mike views the world through a lens of great compassion, seeing pieces of God in all His creations. My Christian side suffers with those in pain and finds reason for hope in everyone. Against all reason, Christian Mike believes it’s never too late for redemption and that salvation is always at hand.

Christian Mike wants to drop his fishing net and follow Jesus. So I let him. And Atheist Mike tags along for the ride.

And Mike lived happily ever after…. NOT!!!

His former atheist friends now reviled him for being delusional, and a fraud, and irrational; for mistaking socially induced hallucinations for experiences with God. Isn’t it much more likely that rather than the Creator of the universe showing up for you while stubbornly obscuring any evidence that someone could actually use; your moment of transcendence was just a phenomenon of your brain triggered by alcohol and a wide-open space?

And Christians? Well from an Amazon reader review of Finding God in the Waves:

However, I do think it’s sort of mis-marketed. Because this isn’t really about a guy becoming an atheist and then finding his faith (Christian faith) again. It’s more like a really devout Jesus-loving guy becoming an atheist and then having a deeply spiritual experience and becoming kind of a theist. He now sort of believes in a God, and thinks Jesus was really connected to God, and thinks there are all sorts of reasons why prayer works. And hey, you don’t even have to believe in God for it to work! And the resurrection? Nah.

So, the fact that this was marketed as a guy finding his way back to God through science is super disingenuous. Especially as he spends a lot of time talking about how much difference there is when people talk about “God.” He’s basically saying, “I’m pretty sure there is a God, and you can make the case for it.” “I’m pretty sure Jesus was an actual person, and nobody would call you crazy for thinking that.” “Prayer works, but it doesn’t really have anything to do ‘God.'”

I’m just at a loss, really. I don’t even know how to review this book. At what point do we stop calling it “progressive Christianity” and just call it … nothing. You can believe in evolution and still call it Christianity. You can doubt whether Adam and Eve were literal people. I think you can read the OT and admit that Noah and the Ark probably was more myth than fact and still call it Christianity. But removing the resurrection? Admitting Christ probably did live, but he surely did not die and was raised by God. Saying “prayer works, but probably not for the reasons you’re thinking it does,” … just stop. You’re not talking about Christianity anymore. And you didn’t find your way back to God (the God that you’re meaning by saying that; the God you’re hoping everyone assumes when you say that).

I guess this just feels like: Man loses faith, then man decides there could be a god, or even a God, man thinks Jesus was a great guy, man believes prayer to be powerful, though unrelated to religion. Man calls this faith. Everyone seems to love this book. Maybe I’m missing something? But i really wish I could go back in time and not have read this. I don’t think I am the intended audience, because honestly I feel a bit devastated by it.

It seems very sad to me that a man who has a crisis of faith, essentially loses it for all intents and purposes, and then begins a process of finding it again cannot be granted the space and the grace to work out that process. It is ironic that most of the people at Mike’s Baptist church only discovered he’d lost his faith after he’d already regained it. A few were supportive, but most could not abide the questioning attitude that Mike was finally open to admitting. To them, Mike was “a double minded man… unstable in all his ways” (James 1:8). But if you read James in context, the double-mindedness has to do with the hypocritical treatment of the poor versus the fawning treatment of the rich, not intellectual questions.

In retrospect, Mike realized that it was time to move on from fundamentalism. Crisis often brings growth. As he came back to faith, he made peace with Christianity one piece at a time. First, he says, he found scientific terms for the forces and experiences people called “God”. Those insights let him be comfortable leaving the word atheist behind. The practice of prayer has been shown to have valuable neurological benefits for the practitioners. That knowledge let Mike pray un-self-consciously and feel like a real person of faith instead of a facsimile. Coming to terms with Jesus was more difficult, but admitting the limits of his knowledge helped him, and finding a healthy church that accepted him for who he was and was willing to allow the growth to take place at his rate and understanding was important for his social health.

Coming to terms with the Bible took a little longer but Mike basically came to the conclusions that Chaplain Mike has noted in a recent post :

The Bible is incarnational. That is, it comes to us in fully human form, taking the words of people written in their own times, from within their own cultures, according to the genres and literary conventions common to their day, and within the confines of their own limited perspectives, to communicate God’s message.

The Bible involves a complex conversation of faith over time. The Bible contains multiple voices, a diversity of narrative and theological perspectives, and a development of thought over time. For example, Joshua and Judges present two sides of the conquest of Canaan. Ecclesiastes and Job protest the wisdom tradition represented by a book like Proverbs, which even in its own pages presents several points of view. The “history” of Chronicles presents a different scenario of the same events than we see in the books of Kings. This diversity is only a problem if we expect the Bible to be something it is not—a timeless and perfectly consistent, always harmonizable record that is precise in every detail according to modern standards of accuracy.

Now Mike blogs, and podcasts, and gives talks about his journey in churches, colleges, and conferences exploring the intersection of science and faith. Even though atheists wonder why he bothers trying to put intellectual legs on hokey, Bronze age mythology and even though prominent Christian websites recently called one of his podcasts as “more dangerous than atheism.” But he has an audience among the nones and dones that those “prominent Christian websites” can only wish for. They have ceased having an audience in this culture and are now locked in their own echo chamber, literally preaching to their own choir.

And even though skeptics challenge the idea of an unseen spirit realm, what is the world but the composition of strange little particles, themselves made of energy and invisible fields. We are, in fact, numinous and ethereal beings made of mostly empty space and probabilistic waveforms. So, yes, sometimes Mike uses new metaphors for God, blending the words of the ancients with the insights of modern science. But Mike thinks, and I wholly agree, that doing so plants him firmly and deeply within the biblical Christian tradition. Mike says:

The God in my axioms isn’t superior to the God I once found in the Southern Baptist faith and message…I’m done saying I’ve found the right one—mysticism tells me that these are all metaphors, all symbols, pointing to a single God who is beyond anything I will ever be able to imagine.

Be it Moses’ burning bush or Carl Sagan’s cosmos, both propel me to a posture of worship: an understanding that I did nothing to get here, on this planet at this time with these people, and yet I get to enjoy it all. Every sunrise, every breakfast at the table with my kids, every skinned knee, and every kiss from my wife. Every song, poem, and yes, every loved one I lose is a gift. To share the joys and sorrows of my friends, to see little ones born and old ones die, all tie me to an incredible cycle of unspeakable beauty that I am part of, and the only possible word I have for all is this one: God.

I keep finding God in the waves—the waves of the Pacific, the waves of gravity, the waves of electromagnetic energy, and all the waves that move through our brains. I find God in the sound waves of ancient hymns, of children laughing… This is, of course all wildly unscientific, wildly imprecise. It has to be… Only a poet or a painter can do the work of sharing this truest of all things. Love.

I find Mike’s story to deeply resonate within me. Every Christian apologetic is eventually answered by the skeptic just as every atheist assertion has a Christian rebuttal. Every spiritual experience is merely hearsay to everyone else. Deeply personal experience is still just that—personal. And as I said in a previous post, if you make God a hypothesis of nature you can only end up making that god into a demiurge. Therefore, empirically, God does not exist, as we have no need of that hypothesis. Virgins don’t give birth, especially to male babies, and 3-day dead corpses don’t re-animate and ascend to… where? The sky, outer space? Just where is heaven anyway; empirically it doesn’t exist.

In the end, one is, of course perfectly free to believe in the “just-there-ness” of the cosmos. But that naturalist view of things is just a picture of the world, not a truth about it that we can know, or even a conviction that rests upon a secure rational foundation. If the naturalist is perfectly consistent then we must see that such a view is utterly deterministic. On the other hand, this deterministic machine floats upon a quantum flux of ceaseless spontaneity and infinite indeterminacy. Neither level of reality explains the existence of the other. So nothing we know obliges us to find this picture more convincing that one in which higher causes (among which we might, for instance, include free will) operate upon lower, or in which all physical reality is open to a transcendent order that reveals itself in the very existence of nature. To my mind, “chaos” could not produce laws unless it were already governed by laws, and the question of being cannot be answered by a theory that applies only to physical realities. But maybe that’s just me (and David Bentley Hart whom I borrowed these notions from) and your mileage may vary.

Musings on Moral Theology (3)

White River State Park, Indianapolis, Indiana

Note from CM: Our Ordinary Time Bible Study in Philippians will be switched to Fridays, to allow three days at the beginning of week to cover other topics.

• • •

Musings on Moral Theology (3)

Moral psychology can help to explain why the Democratic Party has had so much difficulty connecting with voters since 1980. Republicans understand the social intuitionist model better than do Democrats. Republicans speak more directly to the elephant. They also have a better grasp of Moral Foundations Theory; they trigger every single taste receptor.

• Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind

•

Jonathan Haidt’s second great contribution in his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, is his work on Moral Foundations Theory. His succinct metaphor for his overall conclusion is:

The righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors.

Unlike some in the history of moral philosophy who tried to boil down morality into a single universal maxim, such as Kant’s categorical imperative, Haidt came to see that such approaches were “oversystematized and underempathized.” He instead concluded that David Hume’s ” pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach to ethics was more promising,” and he began using the metaphor of our various taste receptors to describe the variety of moralities that make up “the righteous mind.”

He started by recognizing five foundations of moral psychology (Haidt added a sixth later):

The Care/Harm Foundation: “makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; it makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are suffering.”
The Fairness/Cheating Foundation: “makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be a good (or bad) partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters.”
The Loyalty/Betrayal Foundation: “makes us sensitive to signs that another person is (or is not) a team player. It makes us trust and reward such people, and it makes us want to hurt, ostracize, or even kill those who betray us or our group.
The Authority/Subversion Foundation: “makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status, and to signs that other people are (or are not) behaving properly, given their position.”
The Sanctity/Degradation Foundation: “includes the behavioral immune system, which can make us wary of a diverse array of symbolic objects and threats. It makes it possible for people to invest objects with irrational and extreme values—both positive and negative—which are important for binding groups together.”

The following chart shows the results when Haidt had listed and was exploring peoples’ responses to the first five of the foundations:

He found that those who consider themselves more “liberal” or “progressive” place high value on the first two foundations and very little on the latter three.

In contrast, those on the “conservative” end of the spectrum valued all five. Haidt concluded that this gave conservatives an advantage in American political discourse, because it allowed them to speak to a broader set of moral values.

We’ll look into these foundations (and a sixth, which Haidt added after further reflection and research) next week. But the main takeaway from this is as follows:

People who consider themselves on the “liberal” end of the spectrum (I prefer “progressive”) care instinctively most about care and fairness.

Those on the “conservative” end also care about these values, but they define them somewhat differently. For example, liberals define “care” in terms of those they deem marginalized or victimized whereas conservatives may emphasizing caring for those who have sacrificed for the good of the group (i.e. veterans). Also, whereas liberals define “fairness” in terms of equality, conservatives do so in terms of proportionality — each getting what he/she deserves.

Liberals are not so concerned about loyalty, authority, and sanctity, but these are hallmarks of conservative instincts.

•

If you’d like to test this for yourself, go to http://www.yourmorals.org/, where you can take a number of tests to find out how your “moral mind” works and build up your own unique personal “moral profile.”

Musings in Moral Theology (2)

Johnson County Courthouse, Franklin Indiana

Musings in Moral Theology (2)

The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.

• Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind

• • •

The first principle Jonathan Haidt sets forth in his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, is:

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Haidt urges us to recognize that there are two kinds of cognition that we access when making moral judgments: (1) intuition, and (2) reasoning.

As for the first, thousands of “tiny flashes” of judgment “flit through [our] consciousness” every day. These are “automatic” processes that lead us to make “effortless” judgments and decisions, and in fact, they run the human mind and have for millions and millions of years. The process of reasoning that we value so highly and put so much stock in, in fact is more of a servant to this intuitive process.

The metaphor Haidt uses to describe these two forms of cognition and how they function is that of the elephant and the rider. Over the course of human evolution, the elephant (intuition) took on a rider (reason) because the rider did something useful for the elephant. The elephant is still in charge and leads the way, but now it has the rider to come up with rationales for the decisions it makes. He once wrote an article called, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail.”

The rider can do several useful things. It can see further into the future (because we can examine alternative scenarios in our heads) and therefore it can help the elephant make better decisions in the present. It can learn new skills and master new technologies, which can be deployed to help the elephant reach its goals and sidestep disasters. And, most important, the rider acts as the spokesman for the elephant, even though it doesn’t necessarily know what the elephant is really thinking. The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever the elephant wants to do next. Once human beings developed language and began to use it to gossip about each other, it became extremely valuable for elephants to carry around on their backs a full-time public relations firm. (p. 55)

Jonathan Haidt says that independently reasoned judgment is rare. Moral reasoning is not something people do in order to discover the truth. Humans just aren’t wired to dispassionately examine all the evidence and then come to rational conclusions when making moral judgments: “We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.” (p.55)

The rider goes where the elephant goes and then explains/justifies why he went there.

But there is more — a social angle to this. Making moral judgments is not an individualistic endeavor. Haidt calls his theory the “social intuitionist model of moral judgment,”

Moral talk serves a variety of strategic purposes such as managing your reputation, building alliances, and recruiting bystanders to support your side in the disputes that are so common in daily life. (p. 55)

Our moral arguments feel right to us because they align with our intuitions and help us feel accepted and properly aligned within our group. This is the “righteous mind,” and the natural response when someone comes at us with another point of view is to go immediately into defense/combat mode.

However — and this is important — what Jonathan Haidt is not saying is that the elephant is so relentless that it cannot be redirected onto other paths. Intuition is not destiny. We can change or modify our positions. We can allow ourselves to reflect upon our own automatic responses and allow reason to persuade us to see things a bit differently. We can also make space for people who are gifted “elephant whisperers” to help us see things from other perspectives so that we can begin to grasp and feel other moral intuitions.

And if you do truly see it the other person’s way—deeply and intuitively—you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide. (p. 58)

Musings in Moral Theology (1)

Musings in Moral Theology (1)

I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.

• Jonathan Haidt
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

•

Sacrifice—the purity impulse—marks off a zone of holiness, admitting the “clean” and expelling the “unclean.” Mercy, by contrast, crosses those purity boundaries. Mercy blurs the distinction, bringing clean and unclean into contact. Thus the tension. One impulse—holiness and purity—erects boundaries, while the other impulse—mercy and hospitality—crosses and ignores those boundaries.

• Richard Beck
Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

• • •

The two most important books I’ve read over the past few years, especially for these partisan and divisive times in which we live, are:

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt,

— and —

Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality, by Richard Beck.

I did two posts on Beck’s book back in April of 2014:

In another post in which I mentioned what I learned from his book, I wrote:

Many puzzle pieces fell into place when I began to realize how many “theological convictions” have roots in one’s own sense of that which attracts and repels. These impulses run deeper than cognition and analysis. This book (and others) helped me see that my opinions are often more visceral than rationally-based.

In fact, the message of both these books is this: rationality is overrated when it comes to developing our moral psychology.

We think we are reasonable people. We examine the evidence, the arguments, the facts, and then we come to our moral conclusions.

Both Haidt and Beck dispute this, and offer studies to prove that this is simply not the way things actually work.

Our morality is determined rather by our intuitions, our visceral and emotional responses, our conscious or subconscious loyalty to the group to which we belong. Whatever moral reasoning we do tends to follow intuition and emotion, and its purpose is to (1) confirm what our impulsive self has already decided, and (2) to keep us on good terms with the group with whom we identify.

For the next few weeks, on Mondays and Tuesdays, we will be considering various insights from Haidt and Beck.

The main point, as Richard Beck says, is that “there is an affective, experiential, and psychological aspect to theological reflection.”

I would add, as well, “moral” reflection and “political” reflection. Much of what is going on when we “take a stand for truth” is that we are, in reality, exhibiting more of our own visceral and emotional responses to various situations, and then using whatever rational arguments we can muster to justify our “righteous” position.

7th Sunday after Trinity: Pic & Cantata of the Week

(Click on picture for larger image)

• • •

One of Bach’s cantatas for Trinity 7, Cantata BWV 187 — “Es wartet alles auf dish” (These all wait upon Thee) — is a celebration of God’s loving care for creation. Making use of texts from the Psalms and the Gospel of Matthew, this work, which one commentator called “gentle and seductively beautiful,” is a winsome reminder to trust the One “who made us, and not we ourselves.”

In words from the cantata:

If I can only hold onto Him with childlike trust
and take with gratitude what He has considered for me,
then I shall never see myself helpless…

•

Here is opening chorus, about which Craig Smith opined: “The gritty and complex chorus at the beginning is one of his best and most energetic fugues, truly rousing and satisfying.”

Everything waits for You,
so that You give them food at the proper time.
When You give it to them, they gather it;
when You open Your hand,
then are they satisfied with goodness.
(Psalm 104:27-28)

•

Next, here is a performance of the transcendent soprano aria that forms the climax of this cantata. The traditional oboe part is here played on the violin by Itzhak Perlman, and the aria is sung by the incomparable Kathleen Battle.

God takes care of every life
which draws breath here below.
Would He not give to me alone
what He has promised to all?
Worries, be gone! His faithfulness
is my one and only consideration,
and is renewed for me daily
through the many gifts of a Father’s love.

The IM Saturday Brunch: July 29, 2017

THE INTERNET MONK SATURDAY BRUNCH

”It is talk-compelling. It puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week.”

NEWS OF THE WEEK

This guy made all kinds of news.

This little guy got the worst possible news…and now it’s over.

This guy got good news…for him, anyway.

This guy gave his fans bad news.

This guy gave his team bad news.

This guy must be wondering what each day’s news will bring.

This guy’s words were too profane for the news.

Soldiers like this one got the news via Twitter.

• • •

YA GOTTA HAVE GOALS

Ray and Wilma Yoder, 80, of Goshen, Indiana, have been faithfully pursuing their dream, such as it is. The couple has visited 644 out of 645 Cracker Barrel restaurant locations, and they plan to eat at the only one they’ve yet to visit later this year.

As our local Fox TV station reported, the couple visited their 644^th location in Lavonia, Georgia on July 7 when they attended the grand opening. The only one they haven’t seen is in Tualatin, Oregon, which is a suburb of Portland, but they are planning a trip there later this year.

Ray used to deliver RVs around the country, and he always ate at Cracker Barrel. Then, when he started taking Wilma with him, they began checking off which restaurants they’d visited. Now, after 40 years, they’ve almost gone to them all, and they’ve become celebrities in the “Cracker Barrel” world.

In order for a visit to count, they say, their own rule is that they have to buy something and leave a tip. Bon appetit!

• • •

THE TWEETER IN CHIEF

Just in case you’d like a comprehensive listing of the ~~350~~ 351 people President Trump has thus far insulted on Twitter, complete with the tweets themselves, someone is keeping track.

Here’s the link: TRUMP TWITTER INSULTS

But hey, better check in regularly — the list is growing fast.

• • •

REST IN PEACE, HADDON ROBINSON

Students and practitioners of expository preaching in the evangelical world lost one of their heroes and role models when Haddon Robinson died on July 22. His memoriam from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary lists his accomplishments:

Originally from the Mousetown section of Harlem, New York, he received a Bachelor’s Degree from Bob Jones University, Master of Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, Master of Arts from Southern Methodist University and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Illinois. He was also awarded honorary degrees from Gordon College and McMaster Divinity College.

Dr. Robinson joined Gordon-Conwell in 1991 as the Harold John Ockenga Distinguished Professor of Preaching, following 12 years as President of Denver Conservative Baptist Seminary, now Denver Seminary, and 19 years on the faculty of Dallas Theological Seminary. Throughout his long and distinguished career, he also served as Associate Pastor for the First Baptist Church in Medford, Oregon, Instructor of Speech at the University of Illinois and General Director of the Christian Medical and Dental Society.

In 1996, he was named in a Baylor University poll as one of the “12 Most Effective Preachers in the English Speaking World.” In 2006, he was recognized by Christianity Today in the top 10 of its “25 Most Influential Preachers of the Past 50 Years.” In 2008, he received the E.K. Bailey “Living Legend Award.” And in 2010, Preaching magazine named him among the “25 Most Influential Preachers of the Past 25 Years.”

Always looking for new ways to reach more people for Christ, he was also active in broadcast media. He hosted the television program, “Film Festival,” and with Dr. Alice Mathews and Mart De Hann, hosted “Discover the Word,” a radio program which for 20 years broadcast 600 times daily to two million listeners throughout North America and other English speaking countries.

A prolific writer, Dr. Robinson wrote more than a dozen books, including his hallmark text, Biblical Preaching, still used by seminaries and bible colleges around the world. His articles appeared regularly in Christianity Today, Bibliotheca Sacra, Moody Monthly, the American Lutheran Magazine, Leadership and Decision, and in the Our Daily Bread devotional. He also edited the Christian Medical Society Journal and the Theological Annual, and served on the editorial boards of Preaching and Christianity Today.

• • •

WHAT’S YOUR TAKE ON THE MATH HERE?

Small Church. Photo by Adon Metcalfe at Flickr. Creative Commons License

I have argued before that having many small churches is better for the kingdom and the world than having a few large churches.

Now, Karl Vaters has agreed with this opinion by listing 11 reasons. This is from his article: 11 Advantages of Having 50 Churches of 100 Instead of 1 Church of 5000:

We’d have far more successful churches.
More pastors would get to use their gifts.
Church leaders would be under less pressure.
Fewer pastors would quit in frustration and discouragement.
Our time and energy could be utilized better.
It would require less overhead, land, and resources.
More people would get pastored by their pastor.
We could reach more types of people.
Failure wouldn’t be fatal.
We could have more churches in hard places.
More people might want to be pastors.

What do you think of his reasons and his reasoning?

• • •

PERSECUTION OF ATHEISTS!

“New Atheist” Richard Dawkins was scheduled to speak Aug. 9 at a book signing and benefit for KPFA, a Berkeley, CA public radio station. But the station, citing “Dawkins’ abusive speech against Muslims,” notified ticket holders by email that it was canceling the event.

Now, according to RNS, “On Thursday (July 27), Dawkins announced on Twitter that the event has been rescheduled on the same day 18 miles to the west at Book Passage, an independent bookstore in Marin County. It is no longer a benefit for KPFA.”

Despite KPFA’s long history of promoting free speech (it is in Berkeley, after all) Dawkins is in good company when it comes to the radio station’s recent history of cancelling speakers.

The university has been the center point for multiple free speech issues this year. In February, university officials canceled an appearance by former Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos after protests turned violent, and in April, the university canceled two scheduled appearances by conservative speaker Ann Coulter.

• • •

DON’T FAINT — I AGREE WITH JOHN MACARTHUR!

That’s right, friends. I’ve found at least one thing said by Pastor Mac that I can heartily commend.

He was participating in a panel discussion during Ligonier Ministries 2017 regional conference in Los Angeles last month, when, during a Q&A session, an audience member asked if it is “truly sinful” for a Christian business person to make a product for a same-sex wedding.

Here’s what MacArthur said in reply:

“No, it’s not sinful for a cake maker to make a cake for a gay wedding anymore than its sinful for a guy who runs a restaurant to serve dinner to somebody who is gay, sits in a booth and eats the food, or goes to the market and buys a loaf of bread and you own the market,” he argued. “What the issue is, is not whether that’s sinful. It’s whether the federal government can demand that people do certain things, which goes against their Christian conscience.”

MacArthur argued that this is “more of a political governmental issue.”

“I actually think that we need to show love to everyone and particularly, we need to do good to all those that are outside the kingdom, as well as inside the kingdom, as much as possible….”

Whaddaya know, I found something about which I agree with Pastor John!

Mark this down, iMonkers. You may never see the like again.

• • •

CHILLING, TERRIFYING TESTIMONY

I heard a few different interviews with William Browder, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week about his experiences with Russia. Here’s a brief summary of that testimony from NPR:

William Browder knows Vladimir Putin’s Russia all too well.

Browder made a fortune in Russia, in the process uncovering, he says, incredible amounts of fraud and corruption. When he tried to report it to authorities, the government kicked him out of the country and, he alleges, tortured and killed the lawyer he was working with.

In what one senator called one of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s “most important” hearings, Browder, a wealthy businessman-turned-activist-turned Putin-adversary shed a chilling new light on a Russian system of government that operates ruthlessly in the shadows — as Browder described it for lawmakers: a “kleptocracy” sustained by corruption, blackmail, torture and murder with Putin at its center.

“Effectively the moment that you enter into their world,” Browder told senators investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, “you become theirs.”

Here are some interviews with Browder you can check out:

• • •

RANDOM THOUGHTS & OBSERVATIONS

Getting a job in the White House: pic.twitter.com/UjqKDUNeIC

— Church Curmudgeon (@ChrchCurmudgeon) July 28, 2017

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

It has yet to be confirmed if this picture from Vladimir Putin’s childhood is genuine or has been doctored:

Fridays with Damaris Zehner: Another Look — Christians Need More Enemies

Sleepy Dog, Disgruntled Cat #2. Photo by dixie wells

Note from CM: Today’s repost is the first that Damaris wrote for us at IM, back in 2010. Readers could see her insight and prodigious writing talent from the very beginning, and I’m glad she’s been able to continue with us over the years. I’m blest to call her a friend and colleague.

• • •

We Christians ought to have more enemies.

This post is not about fat and happy Christians needing more suffering to test their faith. It’s not about standing up for what we believe, regardless of who we offend. It’s not about drawing a circle around ourselves that leaves out everyone who doesn’t agree with us.

It’s about the commandment in the Bible to love our enemies and to forgive them.

I was reading that passage recently. It hit me: “There’s no one I call my enemy.” Maybe that’s a good thing. My life has been an easy and comfortable one compared to many people’s. I’m not persecuted, imprisoned, impoverished, or the victim of prejudice. And maybe I’m such a nice person that everyone likes me and I like everyone else.

Well, no. Let’s not go that far.

So therefore, if I have no enemies, I have no one I need to forgive or make an effort to love, right? When I arrived at that conclusion, I began to get suspicious of my thought process. I really don’t think that love and forgiveness are optional in the Bible. They are the irreducible way of the cross, as the Lord’s Prayer makes clear. If we have to learn forgiveness, what was someone like me to do, someone with a pretty good life and no enemies to forgive? Obviously, find some enemies.

According to Matthew 5:44, an enemy is someone who despitefully uses me. Has anyone done that? Well, yes, several people have done that. Have the people around me loved me as they love themselves? Have they sought my good? No, not all of them. Has anyone hurt me, insulted me, ignored me, disagreed with me in a hateful way? Certainly.

Are these people then my enemies? Enmity seems like a big word for such minor offenses. I’m almost ashamed to use it when other Christians are being tortured and killed. But if I allow a category of people who have hurt me in some way but who are not my enemies, then I have a category of people I don’t need to forgive. All these people who aren’t really my enemies: I can gripe about them, cut them down, avoid them, act sour or distant to them — but I don’t need to forgive them, because they aren’t torturing or killing me.

That’s a dangerous way to think. Is this kind of thinking really a problem among Christians other than me?

I believe it is. I noticed during the last election, for example, a torrent of hateful speech about our current president. Life-long Christians spoke with venom about Barack Obama and passed on gossip that had been proven to be untrue. Some even joked — I didn’t laugh — about killing him, which is treason in addition to sin. But if I had asked them, “Is Barack Obama your enemy?” most would have said no. They too had a category of people whom they didn’t have to love but also didn’t have to forgive.

It sounds funny, and a little paranoid, to say we need to identify more people as enemies. But once we have, then we can learn to forgive and to love as God has forgiven and loved us. We think it’s Christian to shrug off and minimize offenses, but if by doing so we absolve ourselves from the duty to be like Jesus, then we are doing wrong.

I posted a comment after an iMonk article recently, that there are only two categories of people: friends, whom I have to love, and enemies, whom I have to love. There is no other category; no “slightly annoying people whom I can handle on my own, thanks;” no “wrong-headed politicians who haven’t harmed me personally but whom I’m free to slander if I want.” If you can’t call someone a friend, then call him an enemy, but love him and forgive him, as God has commanded us to do.

And I’d highly recommend avoiding people who electronically or in the flesh act as if there’s a third category of people we’re allowed to hate. But be careful — if those hatemongers are our enemies, we have to love them, too.

• • •

Photo by dixie wells at Flickr. Creative Commons License

Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science. A review of the book by Mike “Science Mike” McHargue. Part 4.

Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

• Part 4

In the world of nerdery, just like any sub-culture, there are the elites. Elite nerds are computer savvy, science aficionados, and they work at places such as Apple, or Google, or even Marvel Comics. But if nerdom has a Mecca, it would have to be NASA. Mike’s social media expertise earned him an invitation to Dryden Flight Research Center who were opening their doors to the public for the first time and were inviting a handful of bloggers to document the festivities.

About a week later, Mike got an email from an old friend who had moved to Los Angeles for seminary and was also working for Rob Bell. Bell was holding a small 50-person conference on creativity. Mike had heard that Bell was a master at building storytelling suspense, even as he broke down complex, ancient ideas about God. Of course, he didn’t care about explaining God to people but if he could pick up some useful creativity tips it would help his career. The Bell conference was right after the NASA conference. Coincidence? That’s all Mike thought it was, but Mom and wife were convinced that “God was going to move”. Mike said:

I tried to be gracious, but it annoyed me how much significance my wife and mother placed on this timing. What they saw as the hand of God was nothing more than pattern-matching systems in human brains. But they were right. As it turned out, that trip would leave one hell of a pattern on me.

NASA was everything Mike had hoped for and more. There, right in front of him was an honest-to-God SR-71 Blackbird, he got to sit in a fighter jet and saw gear used to test the Apollo mission.

But the best part was:

What I enjoyed most was the community of nerds. At Dryden, I wasn’t a deacon. I wasn’t a Christian at all. No one here cared I thought the universe was billions of years old. No one asked about my thoughts on God. We were just a bunch of science nerds hanging out on the frontier where great science was done. For the first time, I felt I was able to be myself—my true self. I took off my Christian mask and felt the sunlight on my face.

The next day he drove to Los Angeles where his friend and coworker was celebrating her 25^th birthday at a bar. They had a few drinks and then a few more. Then the birthday girl had a brilliant idea—karaoke! Well they stumbled into an old neighborhood bar where the songs were the old familiar standards, and everyone was singing along. In Mike’s words:

A couple of songs in, I looked around the room. Everyone was smiling and singing. They were strangers an hour ago, but now they had their arms around one another’s shoulders… People held hands. They sang without self-consciousness or shame. They weren’t performing either. In all my years of singing in pews, I’d never heard anything so beautiful…

Somehow, in this small bar in Los Angeles, people had left their egos behind and were simply celebrating life together. There was no shame or pride. There was no posturing. There was just the music and the joy of being alive…

In that bar with my friends and the singing crowd, I felt the presence of something greater than even the grandeur of the cosmos, something more mysterious than the teeming subatomic particles that comprise our reality. I searched my mind for a word that would describe this perfect moment. It was more than beautiful, more than sacred.

Holy.

It was holy.

The book by Donald Miller, “Blue Like Jazz” played an important role in Mike’s life. In fact, Mike had a bit role in the movie made from the book. You can see him sitting in the front row of the church in the movie’s trailer.

In the book, young Don gets angry and storms out of his church. He’s angry because his Mom is sleeping with his youth pastor, a man who supposed to be a mentor to Don. Don is so hurt by this betrayal that he goes from being a good Baptist to an angry rebel, pulling his faith apart piece by piece.

The next day after the karaoke party, Mike and his friends discover, by some quirk, that Blue Like Jazz was playing nearby. So they go see it. At first it was funny, seeing yourself projected on a screen, but then when the movie got to the betrayal scene something broke in Mike. He realized that the God he no longer believed in betrayed him just like Don Miller:

This God whom I’d loved and worshipped, whom I’d trusted, who was supposed to be all-powerful, had sat by and done jackshit while my parent’s marriage fell apart. Where was God when Dad started to fall in love with another woman? Was He distracted? Where was “the One who can part the sea” when the two of them held hands for the first time? Where was the Almighty when Mom prayed for things to get better? “Great is Thy Faithfulness”? Hardly. Great is Thy neglect, great is thy cosmic indifference. Great is thy absence.

The anger didn’t last long. It soon turned to sorrow, an aching sense of loss over what was and what could have been. I thought about going fishing with my dad, of saying prayers with my mom, and laughing around the dinner table. I thought about the wholeness of a family that was centered around God. A God who never was…

For the first time, I realized that my deconstruction of faith hadn’t been the rational and clinical pursuit I believed it to be. When I opened Genesis, I wasn’t just looking for answers: I had a bone to pick. I’d wanted answers for Dad, sure, but I’d also expected answers for myself. I’d expected God to justify Himself to me, but God failed to do that.

Instead, He bowed His head and died.

The next morning when Mike went to the Rob Bell conference, he was wary and intensely skeptical. He was now tired of maintaining his façade as a Christian. He knew he couldn’t keep the act up anymore. As he approached the little bungalow that hosted the conference Rob Bell was standing outside and greeting people. But he didn’t want to meet Bell; all he wanted to do was mine some secrets about creativity and then get the hell out.

The conference was a mixed bag for Mike. He was delighted and surprised to see Christians who were unafraid of dealing with evolution and had an appreciation for the good things that science, and a respect for empirical evidence, brings to society. But at the same time, when the subject of the New Atheism came up this same roomful of basically science-literate believers, instead of dealing with the real claims and implications of empiricism, instead dealt in truisms and sound bites.

Mike couldn’t take it anymore, he raised his hand, and Bell called on him. He admitted what had been going on in his life for the last two years. He was a Southern Baptist atheist. He told the room how his faith had deconstructed; that anyone who understands how the universe works could not believe in God. The horse was out of the barn.

To Mike’s utter amazement Bell said, “Thank you. On behalf of everyone here, thank you. I think we all needed to hear that.” A few people began to clap, and as he looked around the room, instead of angry, scolding faces, people looked genuinely concerned for him and his struggle. Then Bell said:

You are here, and there is something in you that doesn’t’ go away even when you become an atheist. I say, let’s all celebrate that. There’s no need to define it further—our words will just screw it up. I think that God, if there is a God, doesn’t ask you for anything more than that. I really believe that God is that which we can’t stop talking about, and that God is what happens when our words fail.

Mike realized that the people in that beach house that day accepted him exactly as he was. He didn’t feel like an outsider. He threw the fullness of his doubts about God at them, and they held it with grace. They didn’t shout him down or take apart his arguments. They didn’t try to win him over or rebuke him. They just accepted him. And they even thanked him for caring. Mike said this:

If you’re a Christian who wonders what to do with someone who’s in doubt, consider these words carefully: Love and grace speak loudly. The first and best response to someone whose faith is unraveling is a hug. Apologetics aren’t helpful. Neither are Scripture references. The first thing a hurting person needs is to know they’re not alone. My path back to God was paved with grace by those who received my doubt in love.

For the first time in a long time Mike felt the presence of God. He found that confusing and disorienting. It’s not as if he believed again—he still had the same rational objections to the existence of a supernatural deity. It’s just when he pondered Rob Bell’s challenge to put all his questions in a mental bucket called God, he felt God again.

After the dinner on the last night of the conference they all went downstairs where a table was set with bread and wine. Well, Mike knew what was coming next—Communion, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper. Jesus’ body broken for him. Except that was impossible. And what would it help? Are we saying God sent Himself in the form of His own Son and then died to protect me from Himself? The punishment He Himself was going to give me for not believing in Him? That didn’t make any sense. In Mike’s own words:

The problem was that I couldn’t take the bread without taking the metaphor. And that felt dishonest. I didn’t believe that the body of Christ was broken for me, because I didn’t believe there was a body to break.

I decided to walk away. But just when I was about to turn, I heard a voice say, “I was here when you were eight, and I’m here now.”

I froze, startled and amazed.

Mike thought about his life up to that point; the hiding from bullies, talking to Jesus in the woods, his daughter’s baptism, his wife in her wedding dress. About all the awful things he’d done even when he knew better, and yet how full of laughter and love his life was despite that.

And he reached out and took the bread from Rob’s hand. The Rob said, “This is the blood of Christ shed for you”. He dipped the bread into the wine and ate it. He took the bread and the metaphor and ran from the room, his face full of tears. Mike:

This is the part where I should explain the science of how a sane person can hear an audible voice in a room where no one has spoken. Believe me, I’ve spent a long time researching it, and I would love to explain it. I can’t. The closest thing I can find in the sciences are hallucinations. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe I had so much longing and pent-up emotion that I fell into a semi-hypnotic state in a very suggestive environment. The bread, the wine, the prayer—there’s a reason the Eucharist is a sacrament. This table has spoken to people confused about God for thousands of years before I picked up The God Delusion. Even though it’s my life’s mission to help reconcile God and the sciences, that process breaks down at this point in my story. I can’t explain what happened in that moment. Which is unfortunate, because hearing Jesus speak to me was nothing compared to what happened next.

Mike couldn’t sleep that night; so much cognitive dissonance was roiling his thoughts. About 2 or 3 in the morning he went down to the beach below his hotel. He was pretty high up on the beach and couldn’t see the ocean, it was all black; but he could hear the waves. He couldn’t tell where the water ended and the sky began—a powerful force he could hear and feel but not see; a metaphor for this relation with God. So he began to “pray” facing the waves. He began to pour his heart out. He couldn’t unlearn all the things that made him no longer believe. He couldn’t understand why a supposed good and all powerful God would allow all the suffering that went on. Why would you answer one mother’s prayer for her child while another mother pours her heart out and yet her child starves, or is raped, or is killed by some warlord? But I miss you God and I don’t want to be away from you anymore. From the book:

So let’s make a deal. I will try to do the best I can to do good in this world. I will serve others, and work against suffering. But I have to keep asking these questions about your justice and mercy. And I can’t forget about suffering.

Let’s just keep talking about this, You and I. I don’t ever want to be away from you again. I can’t do that anymore.

All I know is, I met Jesus tonight.

When I said the word Jesus, the waves rushed toward me. I was standing high up on the beach, 25 or more above the waves, but still the water rushed up and over my feet—all the way up to my shins. I thought about what Rob had said: that Christ’s last act of service before His crucifixion was to wash the feet of His followers… Time stopped. The waves seemed to stand still, as if an unseen hand had pressed pause on the universes remote… I don’t know how long it lasted, but it was by far the most powerful moment of my life… After it was over, I understood why someone would feel compelled to write about a bush that burned and was not consumed. Or a blinding light on the road to Damascus. Or an angel telling a 14-year old virgin girl she was pregnant with the Son of God. There weren’t words to describe the things they, and I, experienced.

Well there you go, Imonks. An atheist hears the audible voice of God and has a mystical experience on the beach. But here is where Mike goes off “script”. In the evangelical script, Mike drops to knees and repents of his doubt and unbelief. He goes back to church, gives his “testimony”. All is clear now, the clouds have rolled away, the sun has risen, hallelujah, halleluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuujah. Except he didn’t.

He went and had a complete neurological exam including an MRI to see if he had a brain tumor that caused the hallucinations. He went and had a complete psychiatric exam to see if he had symptoms of mental illness. You see Mike had become an emotional and experiential Christian who was also an intellectual atheist. I told you his story doesn’t fit any script you’ve ever heard before.

Life is like jazz because it doesn’t resolve… But what if we’re not alone? … What if all these stars are notes on a page of music, swirling in the blue… like jazz…

Ordinary Time Bible Study: Philippians – Friends in the Gospel (6)

Ordinary Time Bible Study
Philippians: Friends in the Gospel
Study Six

Note: When passages are quoted at the beginning of new sections, I will be using The Message translation because of its conversational, friendly tone. You can compare this version with others, as well as have access to Gordon Fee’s commentary, at Bible Gateway.

✥

There is nothing else quite like this passage in Paul’s extant letters. Very likely, since his and their present suffering stems from the same source—the Roman Empire—he intends much of this to serve as paradigm. Here is how they too should respond in the context of their present difficulties.

• Gordon Fee

• • •

PHILIPPIANS 1:12-18

I want to report to you, friends, that my imprisonment here has had the opposite of its intended effect. Instead of being squelched, the Message has actually prospered. All the soldiers here, and everyone else, too, found out that I’m in jail because of this Messiah. That piqued their curiosity, and now they’ve learned all about him. Not only that, but most of the followers of Jesus here have become far more sure of themselves in the faith than ever, speaking out fearlessly about God, about the Messiah.

It’s true that some here preach Christ because with me out of the way, they think they’ll step right into the spotlight. But the others do it with the best heart in the world. One group is motivated by pure love, knowing that I am here defending the Message, wanting to help. The others, now that I’m out of the picture, are merely greedy, hoping to get something out of it for themselves. Their motives are bad. They see me as their competition, and so the worse it goes for me, the better—they think—for them.

So how am I to respond? I’ve decided that I really don’t care about their motives, whether mixed, bad, or indifferent. Every time one of them opens his mouth, Christ is proclaimed, so I just cheer them on!

Some people are pessimists who see the glass half empty. Others are optimists, they see the glass half full. Paul saw life through sacramental eyes: in the midst of his very real and very troubling circumstances, he envisioned another reality at work. Paul saw the glass — no matter how much was in it — filled with heaven.

That doesn’t mean that Paul was “other-worldly” in his approach to life, far from it. He did not ignore, deny, or explain away the hardships of life, a characteristic far too common among today’s Christians. Rather, as Gordon Fee says in his commentary, “One can scarcely miss the focus of Paul’s concern, here and always: Christ and the gospel.” Like a team athlete who fights through personal pain and keeps his focus on the overall picture of winning the game, remembering that the victory is not up to him alone but that he is one part in a much bigger team effort, Paul exemplifies for us a persevering kind of faith, not a Pollyanna kind of faith.

1:12-18 is the first part of a passage that goes to 1:26. It is where the body of Paul’s letter begins. He turns from the introductory greetings to giving news about himself, his circumstances, and his perspectives on what is happening vis a vis his mission as an Apostle.

A key word, as Fee observes, is the word usually translated as “advance,” or “progress,” or “prosper” (1:12, 1:25).

The focus of the first paragraph (1:12-18) is that Paul’s imprisonment has, surprisingly, ended up advancing the gospel.
The focus of the second paragraph (1:19-26) is that, despite Paul’s mixed feelings about living vs. dying, he thinks God will let him live to help the Philippians further advance in their faith.

Paul knew his calling and lived to fulfill it for the One who called him. This is a big part of what he means when he says, “For me, to live is Christ…” (1:21).

Reading that, we may get the idea that Paul was relentlessly “driven” with regard to his mission. I think that word has too many contemporary negative connotations to apply here. We speak of someone who is “driven” today is one who often puts projects ahead of people and uses people as tools to accomplish them, who may do whatever it takes to get the job done, even cutting ethical corners, or who is so singleminded about succeeding that he/she comes to think that he/she is unique and indispensable.

None of these apply to Paul and the apostolic mission. Paul’s mission, because it is about advancing God’s kingdom, is one of love, with people whom God loves at the very center of the project. So if Paul is driven to do anything, it is to lay down his life for the benefit of others as his Lord did. Paul’s kingdom mission is also about truth, purity of heart, and integrity. He would rather go to prison than sacrifice and bring shame upon the name of his Lord. And Paul knows that this kingdom mission does not depend on him. He is deeply aware that anything he has and does is because of God’s grace, and that there are many others given similar vocations (see Romans 15:20; 2Corinthians 10:12-18). In our text today, we can even see Paul rejoicing that the name of Christ is being proclaimed by those who are doing it from less than noble motives! (One may assume that the self-aggrandizing spirit of these preachers has not yet tainted the message to any great degree, for then Paul would certainly be singing a different tune.)

Many people revere Paul as a thinker, a theologian. But I have always admired him more as a pastoral figure. It is passages like this that lead me to feel this way. It shows a person alive with love, purpose, and spiritual perception. And one who cares enough about his friends to write them from prison to encourage them with a report like this.

• • •

Ordinary Time Bible Study
Philippians – Friends in the Gospel

Another Look: The IM Interview with Chaplain Mike (2)

Note from CM: Before I started writing for Internet Monk, Michael Spencer asked me to do an interview about Evangelicals and Pastoral Care for the Dying. I’m working on some upcoming posts about using the Bible in ministry and pastoral care, and in preparation I thought it might be good to revisit this seminal discussion. Today, part two.

• • •

Old Man in Sorrow (On the Threshold of Eternity), Van Gogh

THE INTERVIEW (part 2)

4. At what point is it appropriate for a minister to talk about death when a family may be refusing to speak about it?

The subject usually comes up naturally if folks have access to the kind of support I just talked about — a calm, reasonable, caring human friend to sit with them, who is available to listen and support them. Occasionally, a compassionate minister or friend may need to help someone face reality and speak the truth plainly when it is being denied. But most of the time, it is clear that people know what’s going on, and they just need time until they can talk about it.

We have all kinds of people who come into hospice care, and they come from a variety of faith and non-faith backgrounds. Some are on-board and realistic from the beginning. Others say “Don’t mention death or use the word hospice. Hide your badge so mom won’t know you are from hospice.” Some refuse to sign “Do Not Resuscitate” orders because they can’t imagine not trying to bring dad back if possible. They put off making funeral arrangements or getting necessary documents together. Some don’t want the chaplain to visit. A friend of mine said he once had a patient who called the chaplain, “the sky-pilot,” the person you only see when you’re ready to be launched into the afterlife! Other folks struggle when grandma doesn’t want to eat anymore, and so they keep trying to force food into her. Many people refuse to give or take pain medications, especially morphine, because they view that as crossing the line and forsaking life.

So, in hospice we have to be gentle with people and respect their journey. We pretty much don’t force anything but emphasize giving good information and the kind of supportive presence that will give people permission to talk about things they’d rather not face. I’d recommend ministers and friends do the same. Again, it’s not efficient. It takes time. But it is loving, and the “small miracles” we see every day of people being helped and supported through some of the toughest experiences of their lives are worth as much as seeing Lazarus come forth.

5. You deal with many people with little or no faith resources for approaching death. What is your pastoral care strategy in that situation?

First, let me make a foundational statement about what a chaplain is and is not.

Because I am not a pastor in a local church but work for a healthcare organization, I must approach things differently than a minister would. A church pastor has a covenant relationship with his people and serves them with a whole system of theological understandings and expectations in place. A chaplain, on the other hand, must honor the spiritual and religious commitments of patients (even those that he might deem wrong), and serve them according to their own faith traditions. So, if I get a Buddhist patient, unless she wants to talk about the Christian view of God and salvation, it is not my job to force that on her. I will ask if she wants support from someone in her own religious community. Only if she asks me, or I get her permission, will I share my faith with her.

Secondly, let me lay a theological foundation for the way I approach everyone.

The doctrines that have guided me from the beginning in this work are the Bible’s teachings on creation and common grace. God created each human being in his image, and by his grace and providence he sustains us all. I meet and deal with people first based on our common humanity under God. Every person is my neighbor, and I am called, simply, to love my neighbor. Being a chaplain means involves specific ways of doing that. It’s more of a “love your neighbor” ministry than a “win the lost’ ministry (though I’m not always sure about the dichotomy).

Furthermore, because I believe in common grace, I do not understand my job as bringing God to people. He is already with them, and he is already working, no matter who they are. To reference Eugene Peterson again, my duty is (1) to recognize that God has gone before me in every encounter, (2) to discover some of what God is doing in that person’s world, and (3) to figure out how to best cooperate with God in what he is trying to accomplish.

So, when I have a new patient and family without a faith background, I meet them on their turf as neighbor and friend. I do not have an agenda, other than to listen and learn how I might be of assistance. I tell them I am available as a spiritual and pastoral resource, if that is what they want and need, but my main job is simply to be there with them for support. I always offer to pray for them (and ask their permission to do so), and I try to make my prayers personal, filled with Biblical language, and focused on God’s love for people and his promises to be with us in Christ.

I find that this kind of approach often leads to more discussion about “spiritual things” than if I would try to force the matter. One joyful consequence is that I have been asked to do many funerals for un-churched folks, and at the funerals I always try to clearly present the story of Jesus, his salvation, and the hope of eternal life.

I’m not sure evangelicals in general think in these terms. We are often weak on creation and common grace. Instead we see God mainly at work within the community that is separated from the world. We also identify his work primarily with specific “spiritual” matters that we focus on. We sometimes don’t do well simply as human beings living among fellow human beings who are our neighbors, all walking together through the common experiences of life. We are often too “spiritual” for our own good, and for the good of others.

6. What sorts of things make the process of grief difficult for evangelicals?

In my first grief support group, I learned something as I listened to folks talk: It is hard to go to church after losing a loved one. I’ve heard that particularly from those who’ve lost spouses.

First of all, nobody knows how to relate to Joe anymore now that it’s no longer “Joe and Mary.”
Second, few know what to say, and this leads to many awkward and some hurtful encounters.
Third, you (the bereaved) don’t know what to say either, especially when the song leader keeps telling you to smile and be happy in Jesus, and all your brothers and sisters keep saying over and over again, “Remember, she’s in a better place.”
Fourth, you have to sit through something alone that you had always done together; and if your spouse ever sang in the choir or did something up front regularly, then it’s hard to be there and watch others take her place.
Fifth, the church revolves around fellowship and activism. But you would rather be alone, and you don’t have the strength to teach middle-schoolers right now. You don’t fit any longer.
Sixth, since the church is “focused on the family,” you feel like a fifth wheel all the time when you are around other adults.
Seventh, you have to sit and listen to the “7-Day Sex Challenge” sermon series and other such silly talks from the pulpit.

I have heard some incredible stories. A woman I know lost her young son in a tragic accident. Not long afterward, she went to church and stayed in the sanctuary after the service, crying there in the pew. The pastor came by and said, “Now, now, let’s not forget our testimony.” That may be the cruelest sentence I have ever heard pass between one human being and another.

Other cliches or stupid remarks well-meaning Christians use include,

“She’s in a better place.” That’s right. By faith we trust that our believing loved ones are being comforted in God’s presence. But what about the bereaved? Is he in a better place?
“God never gives us anything more than we can bear.” Really? Then why does Paul exhort us to “bear one another’s burdens”? Some things must be too heavy for one person to carry alone. Don’t throw it off on God. He may be asking you to lend a hand.
“I know exactly how you feel.” No you don’t. Not even close. If you did, you wouldn’t say that, you’d probably just join the crying and give the bereaved a hug.
“I remember when so and so died” — Guess what? No one wants to hear your story right now. This is not about you, or someone else. This is about someone drowning in loss.
“Just call if I can be of any help.” Let me clue you in on something. This person does not have strength to pick up the phone and ask for help. This is time for others to take the initiative. Help or don’t help. But be quiet about it.

I tell grieving people all the time just to expect that people will say stupid things and not to take it too personally. Most of us are downright pitiful when it comes to knowing what to say at times like this. Add to that our discomfort with the whole death and dying thing, and the fact that it doesn’t fit into our paradigm of church activities, and the result is usually not a pretty picture.

The overriding issue is that we have lost all sense of the time and energy involved in the process of grief, and we have not allowed space in our lives to let people grieve the way they need to. There is usually a big rush of caring and expressions of sympathy in the first week or two after someone experiences a loss, but then, since we have to get back to our lives, we expect that the bereaved will somehow just magically “get over it” and get back to his.

Other faith communities have learned to do it better. For example, Orthodox Jews have an entire 12-month process of tradition and liturgy for the grieving, which is lived out by the bereaved and faith community alike. However, in evangelicalism the issue again becomes, “How does allowing someone the time and space to grieve fit into our paradigm of fellowship and activism?”

7. If death has come in tragedy, how can evangelical ministers acknowledge that kind of loss while also upholding hope?

As a hospice chaplain, I don’t deal with a lot of sudden deaths, accidents, and the like. I have as a pastor. In the moment, helping people in these circumstances likewise involves finding a way to serve with true human compassion. By God’s grace, I want to be that reasonable, levelheaded, quiet and supportive presence, who can walk faithfully with those going through the tragedy.

A woman in our church had a grandson who died in an automobile accident. She asked me to come to the home where all the relatives, friends, and church members were arriving to be with the family. This was a very expressive bunch, temperamentally and theologically, and the room was filled with wailing and crying and people letting out their emotions in unrestrained ways. What did I do? For most of the evening, I stood with my back to a wall, off to the side and was simply present. Every once in awhile I quietly greeted someone with a hug or pat on the shoulder, but that was about it. I literally did nothing. Yet, if you would ask that woman today what she remembers most about me being her pastor for more than 9 years, she would tell you it was all the help I gave her that night.

After a tragedy, it is important that the pastor and folks in the church realize that the bereaved who are left behind will need support that may require extraordinary attention in the short-term and consistent loving care for the long haul. Hope doesn’t come through words alone, but through a solid and reliable support group that sticks with the hurting.

Having said that, words are also important. Regular participation in the liturgy, which rehearses the fundamental truths of the Gospel over and over again, week after week, and which enables people to feed on God’s saving and sustaining presence through Word and Sacrament, can provide genuine help in reorienting those whose lives have become radically disoriented by tragedy.

8. How does the Gospel inform your work as a hospice chaplain?

The Gospel is the announcement that, in Jesus, God’s new creation has broken into this fallen, dying creation. Through Jesus Christ, the promised new day of God’s rule has dawned, and because of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Spirit, he has dealt the decisive blow to sin, evil, and death, and is creating a new people who will be with him forever in a new heavens and new earth. Until that new creation is revealed in its fullness, those made new by Jesus are called to live in this fallen world as God’s representatives. It is through his new people that God fulfills his mission of taking this Gospel to all the hidden corners of the world, announcing and creating newness everywhere.

That is a grand plan and vocation, but its outworking could not be more down-to-earth. Jesus said the Kingdom unfolds in small, hidden, subversive, often undetectable ways. A primary way it spreads is when one person made new humbles himself to serve another person in need. The Gospel doesn’t set us above other people, it sends us to kneel before them so that we might wash their feet. It doesn’t make us less human, but more fully human; doesn’t separate us from the world around us, but sends us into every part of that world to love and serve our neighbors.

And that’s why I love what I do so much. As a hospice chaplain, it is my privilege to go into places where people are hurting, crying, dying. By God’s grace, I pray that I may announce and create a bit of newness each day for those bound by sin and death. That is Gospel ministry to me.

I wish I knew better how to translate this into counsel for every church, pastor, and Christian. In my view we need to abandon the misguided missions that intoxicate us, and come back to Gospel basics. Forget “building a great church.” Share the good news. Visit the sick. Give relief to the suffering. Sit with the dying. Comfort the bereaved. Be generous to those in need. Be hospitable. Love your neighbor. Live in fully human ways among your fellow human beings under God.

This is not a new “law,” but the Gospel lived out, the “Jesus-shaped” way that the Spirit constrains us to pursue.