The Internet Monk Archives

We’ve Missed the Gospel

Another week, another period of racial tension and outrage in the United States.

As I write these words, this report appears at CBS News:

In cities across the country, protesters pounded the pavement to express their heartbreak, fury and frustration over the murders of two unarmed black men, Alton Sterling and Philander Castile, this week. Video footage of both murders, shared widely on the internet, has helped narrow the emotional distance the American public usually feels in police shootings of black Americans.

CBS goes on to report on protests not only in St. Paul, MN and Baton Rouge, LA, where the deaths occurred, but also in New York, Washington D.C., Dallas, and Chicago. Since George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin in February 2012, followed by a number of other incidents of black people being killed by white police officers, it seems as though the U.S. has regressed in terms of race relations.

When you add to that the anger expressed and the political animosity that has been shown toward various groups of immigrants such as Mexicans and Muslims from any number of countries, it appears that citizens in the U.S. are becoming more and more divided over skin color and ethnic and cultural differences.

I am not qualified to make cultural or political commentary about all of this, and I’m not sure one other voice offering analysis at this roiling moment would make much of a sound.

But I do want to suggest something from the standpoint of a Christian who cares about the teaching of the church and the impact it has upon our neighbors and our world.

I think one thing we are seeing in these intractable racial problems is the failure of the American gospel.

At least since the days of George Whitfield and the First Great Awakening, the evangelical “gospel” has been shrinking into an ever more individualistic, soterian shape. Evangelical churches and Christian ministries continue to proclaim this gospel while at the same time lamenting the decline of our culture.

They fail to make any link between the two. That is an utter failure of Christian theology and practice.

Earlier this year, we did some looking at John M.G. Barclay’s magnificent book, Paul and the Gift. Here’s what Barclay says about the good news of God’s grace that Paul proclaimed:

Paul’s theology of grace is not just about an individual’s self-understanding and status before God. It’s also about communities that crossed ethnic, social, and cultural boundaries. This is what made Paul so controversial in his day.

The sharp knife-edge of the gospel is right here, not only in the message of reconciling people to God, but also in the message of reconciling people who don’t like each other and who have erected all kinds of barriers to keep themselves in a state of separation and enmity.

This is not an optional addition to the gospel, nor is it simply an outcome or extension of the gospel. Rather, it belongs to the nature of the gospel itself.

Anyone who says they hold the gospel while holding on to prejudice has no grasp of the New Testament message of good news in Jesus Christ.

If the U.S. has been so influenced by Christianity, if the gospel has so penetrated and permeated our land, if churches who claim to be preaching it are on every street corner, then how can we look at either our history of racial injustice or the present moment of racial inequality, separation, and conflict, and say that we are actually holding and advancing the genuine article?

We’ve missed it. And our brothers and sisters and neighbors are suffering because of it.

Open Mic, Summer Edition

Open Mic, Summer Edition

Today we offer you the chance to participate in an Open Mic. And since we’re in the midst of the summer season, I thought maybe I’d prime the pump a little bit by asking a few questions.

Before I do, let me say that I want this to be a truly Open Mic, so you don’t have to answer any of these questions, but in case they might spark someone’s interest and move them to get involved, I’ll just throw them out there.

What interesting things are you reading this summer?

Are you traveling to any interesting places this summer?

Are you participating in any special and meaningful events this summer?

Is your church or ministry going to be involved in any special service projects this summer that you think will benefit others?

What music are you listening to this summer?

What special needs can we pray for this summer, as we think of you?

Wherever the discussion leads, the day is yours. Enjoy.

Wednesdays with James: Lesson Six

So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

• Luke 11:9-13 (NRSV)

• • •

Wednesdays with James
Lesson Six: Asking for Wisdom

We are taking an adaptation of Peter Davids’s outline as our “big picture” of the Epistle of James.

Today we look at the second paragraph in James, summarized in the outline as “Wisdom comes through prayer.”

If any one of you falls short in wisdom, they should ask God for it, and it will be given them. God, after all, gives generously and ungrudgingly to all people. But they should ask in faith, with no doubts. A person who doubts is like a wave of the sea which the wind blows and tosses about. Someone like that should not suppose they will receive anything from the Lord, since they are double-minded and unstable in everything they do.

• James 1:5-8, The Kingdom New Testament

Remember the context. The paragraph preceding these words encourages James’s readers to find eschatological joy in the various troubles they are facing, knowing they are designed in the end to bring them to the place of “perfection” in the new creation. They are to recognize that the ups and downs of life are the very process by which we grow and mature. In particular he notes that trouble can work “patience” (endurance) in us. As we said in the last study,

We grow by living, and that means we grow through suffering. We become mature by gaining experience and perspective, and though books (including the Bible) can help us conceptualize some of what that means, experience and perspective must be worked into us. Maturity can’t be taught, only developed. The “patience” James commends is the outworking of real life processes in real life settings with real life choices and adaptations. God does not give us patience, he works it into us through life experience. Virtue is not the result of education in the narrow sense of academic achievement but in the broad sense of letting life and our responses to it (the arena in which God works) form us.

This is the life God is in. He is leading us to the age to come, in which all will be made new. But until then, we who follow Jesus can (and must) participate in the daily process, anticipate the end result, and learn to practice the patience of hope.

On the basis of that passage and this week’s text, as a pastor I learned to tell myself and my parishioners, “We shouldn’t pray for patience or any other virtue. God doesn’t ‘give’ patience or moral character. Instead, those things are ‘worked into’ us through the experiences of life and how we respond to those experiences. However, God does invite us to pray for one particular blessing in the midst of life’s trials.”

That “one particular blessing” is the focus of James 1:5-8, where the author encourages us to pray for wisdom.

What we need when we are “facing various trials” is wisdom. But a wise perspective is often the hardest thing to have when the pressure’s on. It’s hard to think clearly, to see the big picture, to consider the situation from various points of view, and to defer foolish thoughts, words, or decisions that will only make the situation worse. James seems to understand this, and therefore he urges us to pray.

But what are we to pray? And how are we to pray? What does it look like to ask God for wisdom in the midst of stress and trouble?

He doesn’t say here, but if I were to imagine his answer to that question, I would think that James might point us to the Psalms and perhaps to some of the prophets as examples of how to pray when under duress. As a Jewish Christian, James’s own prayer life and the prayer habits of his faith community would have been formed through praying the Psalms and other liturgical prayers. I don’t think he would fully understand or appreciate the emphasis on spontaneous, self-directed prayer that many of us are familiar with today. Instead, he would point us to the practice of praying the scriptures, meditating on them day and night, using forms of lament, petition, wisdom, thanksgiving, and praise that would lead the pray-ers through the process of crying out to God and seeking divine understanding and solace.

This is a process Pastor David Hansen called “Long, Wandering Prayer.” In a post about this I wrote:

The world is obviously no friend to grace when it comes to prayer and contemplation like this. It requires that we let go of deeply ingrained cultural biases toward activism, self-management, productivity, and efficiency. We must refuse to short-circuit the process of relating to God through extended, in-depth conversation that involves listening, questioning, pondering, wondering, speculating, expressing opinions and feelings, arguing, confessing, disputing, and coming to agreement.

In other words, I don’t think James is saying, “Here are the steps to gaining wisdom in your trials. Step one: Pray and ask for wisdom. Step two: God will give you wisdom. Step three: There, now you have it, use it.” No! He is inviting us into a process of relating to God that will lead to us becoming more wise. It’s couched in wisdom-teaching language, so the instruction is concise and punchy, however the process is anything but.

Please note that James gives us something else besides this invitation to prayer. He also gives us encouragement reminiscent of Jesus’ words, reminding us that God is not a stingy or begrudging giver when it comes to answering our requests. God is good, generous, and wants us to be wise. He will surely grant answers to our prayers. It’s just that the process is not a simple transaction: I put down my prayer voucher — God gives me a commodity called wisdom.

Likewise, I think we must read the second part of this text carefully: “But they should ask in faith, with no doubts. A person who doubts is like a wave of the sea which the wind blows and tosses about. Someone like that should not suppose they will receive anything from the Lord, since they are double-minded and unstable in everything they do.”

If you’re anything like me, well that counts us out here at the start, right?

The only way I can grasp this and not be completely discouraged by it is to remember that James is passing along traditional teaching, wisdom teaching that is couched in short, pithy, black and white ways of communication. In wisdom teaching, you’re either in or out, wise or foolish, righteous or wicked, blessed or cursed. That’s how wisdom teachers talk. James says here you either believe or doubt; it’s all or nothing, you’re either single-mindedly trusting God or you’re double-minded and no soup for you! No nuance, no gray areas, no wiggle room.

Okay, wisdom teacher, but what about the man who said to Jesus, “I believe; help my unbelief!”?

We all know that actual life is more like that, right?

I think we should probably cut James (and ourselves) some slack here and recognize the form of teaching he is using. Like a coach challenging his team to overcome an insurmountable deficit, it’s not realistic, but aspirational. This is James’s halftime talk when the team is struggling and he is giving them something higher (though realistically unachievable) to shoot for.

The Bible’s full of this kind of teaching. That’s why there are so many legalists and moralists in our midst. And that’s why the generous and ungrudging Father sent Jesus and why he still answers our imperfect prayers through his grace and mercy.

• • •

Wednesdays with James
Previous Studies

Civil Religion Series: Post-War Alignments

PostWar Preachers — Billy Graham, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Norman Vincent Peale

Civil Religion, part ten
Post-War Alignments

Presidential election years in the U.S. provide American Christians an opportunity to reflect upon our faith and how it applies to our lives as citizens and to the public issues that affect us all. We are taking many Tuesdays throughout 2016 to discuss matters like these.

At this point we are looking at the second book for this series: Was America Founded As a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction, by John Fea. Fea is Associate Professor of American History and Chair of the History Department at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. He blogs at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

• • •

“This nation divinely recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of Nations through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.”

• Suggested resolution to the U.S Constitution
by the National Assoc. of Evangelicals, 1947 & 1954

✥

After World War II, Protestant fundamentalists had split from “modernists” and separated from alliances with those they considered compromisers from biblical faith. They were soon to find reason to distance themselves from more moderate evangelicals (or “neo-evangelicals” as they came to be called), asserting that they were “worldly” in their pursuit of respect from cultural and intellectual elites. They concentrated on building a world of their own consisting of Bible colleges, faith missions, prophecy conferences, and southern denominations and associations. They pretty much took themselves out of the game of cultural engagement.

But three streams of Christian faith continued to flow through American culture in the post-war years to advance their agenda of “Christianizing” the land. John Fea talks about them, and here is a brief summary of his description and analysis.

The Rise of “Evangelicalism”

Evangelicals, especially in light of the Cold War, pressed for a “Christian America” through revivalism by leading evangelists, the construction of evangelical institutions that they hoped would impact intellectual and cultural elites, and the development of parachurch mission ministries that focused on youth, returning soldiers, and college campuses.

A leading figure in a renewed evangelical movement was evangelist Billy Graham.

During the 1940s and 1950s evangelicals wed their hopes for the preservation of Christian America to revival meetings conducted by charismatic preachers. No one was better suited to fulfill this role than Billy Graham. The young preacher, who began his career as an itinerant youth evangelist with the evangelical parachurch organization Youth for Christ, crusaded throughout the United States and the world delivering the message of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Graham always understood hi ministry to be more about winning souls than forging a cultural agenda for the nation, but he probably did more to contribute to the evangelical vision of a Christian America than any other figure. Graham used his sermons to rail against what he believed to be America’s pressing moral problems. His messages were filled with jeremiads against divorce, promiscuous sex, materialism, alcohol abuse, and crime. The only way to overcome these social problems eroding the moral fabric of the United States was for individuals to turn to Jesus Christ. The Cold War often served as a backdrop for Graham’s sermons, many of which included anticommunist rants. Unlike the atheistic Soviet Union, the United States was a Christian nation, or at least had the potential to become one if more people would accept Jesus as their personal Savior. (p. 45).

Graham was the public face of those fundamentalists criticized as “neo-evangelicals.” As Fea describes below, these Protestant Christians were not convinced that dropping out of participation in society was the right tactic. Instead, they sought to engage American culture by building a new culture of “evangelicalism” that would actively dialogue with and challenge the growing secularism they saw in the nation’s institutions.

These so-called neo-evangelicals, who included [Harold] Ockenga and theologians Carl F. H. Henry and Edward J. Carnell, had a deep concern for what they perceived to be the decline of Christian culture in the West. They set out to construct institutions, establish publications, and develop intellectual networks to cultivate an evangelical vision of cultural transformation. Neo-evangelicals founded Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, in 1947 as an evangelical divinity school that would reject the separatist tendencies of fundamentalism by engaging in theological and religious dialogue with mainline and liberal Protestantism. The periodical Christianity Today, founded in 1956, was originally designed as a magazine that would bring evangelical theology to bear on American culture. Though Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today, and other similar initiatives were never as successful as the neo-evangelicals had hoped they would be at moving the country in a Christian direction, they did represent significant evangelical attempts to Christianize America. (pp. 45-46).

Though Fea doesn’t mention it (at least at this point in his book), a significant amount of energy was provided to the movement not only by the mass revivals of preachers like Graham, but also through a number of parachurch ministries that sought to evangelize and “disciple” young people. Such groups as Youth for Christ, Navigators, Young Life, and Campus Crusade for Christ penetrated schools, college campuses, and military bases with outreach efforts and Bible studies designed to win a generation for Christ and turn them into lay evangelists.

The full blossoming of evangelicalism would require the dramatic storms of the 1960’s, which provided fertile ground for the movement’s public ascendancy in public awareness and political engagement from 1970 to the early 2000’s.

Disillusionment in Mainline Protestantism

Once fundamentalism fled the scene and the country had been through the devastation of two World Wars and a Great Depression, Mainline Protestantism went through a period of stagnation, even depression. Its optimistic doctrine of “progress” had been seriously wounded. The energy it had gained in the battles with fundamentalists now was dissipated. So the mainline churches were treading water. But, as John Fea suggests, two new foes were gaining ground and soon became the next “enemies” to give them new energy for the fight.

Despite these difficulties, mainline Protestants fought doggedly to maintain their place as the religious custodians of American culture. The fight was no longer against the fundamentalists for control of Protestant denominations. Mainliners now saw themselves engaged in a larger culture war against two emerging forces in American life: secularism and Catholicism. In 1946 The Christian Century, the flagship periodical of mainline Protestantism, ran a thirteen-part series by retiring editor Charles Clayton Morrison entitled, “Can Protestantism Win America?” Morrison noted that membership in mainline churches was growing, but Protestants were losing the battle for cultural influence. The mission of American Protestantism was not only to win souls and bring spiritual nourishment to the faithful, but to win the culture. Morrison lamented that Protestants were abandoning their “ascendant position in the American community” to the forces of secularism and the rising Catholic threat. (p. 46).

Here were some of the problems Morrison cited in his diagnosis of why the Protestant denominations needed revitalization:

Mainline Protestantism had accommodated too much to American culture and had become sterile.
Ecumenical leaders had focused too much on dialogue with other religions and had watered down the uniqueness of the Protestant faith and the mission to Christianize America.
Protestant leaders were too preoccupied with the politics of their own denominations.

So, as Fea writes, “Morrison challenged local churches to see themselves as part of a biblically rooted ecumenical Protestant movement that transcended denominational identities and differences. He believed that if mainline Protestant churches would rally around these ideas they might have a chance to “win America.” (p. 47)

As we’ll see below, there was a season in the 1950’s when these churches began to grow and exercise renewed influence again when a new threat arose, prompting a wave of “civil religion,” led by mainliners.

Resurgence in Roman Catholicism

At the turn of the 20th century, Pope Leo recognized that the situation in the U.S. had changed and would continue to change dramatically. Despite widespread anti-Catholicism stretching back to the founding of the nation, in the latter decades of the 1800’s immigration had swelled the ranks of Catholics in the U.S., and the Church had begun to secure “a foothold in American culture through the establishment of churches, colleges, hospitals, monasteries, and convents” (p. 48). The Pope issued an encyclical called, “On Catholics in the United States,” in which he traced the impact of the Church on America from the beginning, noted the advantageous changes that had taken place in the current day, and urged the leaders of the Church in the U.S. to seize the opportunity to influence the country for the Catholic faith.

Leo was conscious of some profound changes taking place in American life that might lead to a Catholic revival. Catholic immigrants were flooding American shores. In addition to the large number of German and Irish Catholics who had arrived just prior to the Civil War, massive numbers of southern and eastern Europeans were coming to America as part of what has been called the “new immigration.” The demographic makeup of the country was changing, and the Catholic Church was ready to exert its power to Christianize America. As Leo put it, “America seems destined for greater things. Now it is Our wish that the Catholic Church should not only share in, but help bring about, this prospective greatness.” (p. 48)

The bishops, priests, and churches took this challenge to heart and aggressively made their voice known in American culture. As a result, “from 1945 to 1960 the Catholic population in the United States grew by 90 percent.” (p. 49).

Similar growth was seen in the number of bishops, priests, women religious, seminarians, hospitals, parochial schools, and colleges. Catholicism set out to build a “Christian culture” in the United States and in doing so seemed to pay little attention to the nation’s dominant Protestant ethos. The Catholic attempt at Christianizing America required doing battle against the forces of secularism. Catholics led assaults against the secular and anti-Christian nature of popular culture, defended the family and condemned divorce, criticized the materialism of American capitalism, and excoriated communism’s failure to respect the dignity of humanity. Dolan sums this resurgence up well: “Catholic intellectuals believed that Catholicism was more than just a religion, it was an ‘important cultural reality.’” It should pervade every inch of American culture, including “literature, politics, philosophy, indeed even athletics.” (p. 49).

The 1950’s Revival of Protestant Religion

During the 1950s the U.S. population grew by 19 percent, but church attendance grew by 30 percent. Between 1951 and 1961 Protestants added over twelve million people to their ranks. Church giving also boomed. Between 1950 and 1955 financial contributions to some Protestant churches rose by close to 50 percent. (p. 50)

In response to two perceived threats — Catholicism and Communism — Protestants not only grew but also came closer together, as symbolized by Billy Graham’s inclusion of mainline Protestant pastors and leaders in his crusades. This was accompanied by an increased emphasis in the country and in the government upon “civil religion,” reflected in several public symbolic acts, among which were:

A suggested resolution to the Constitution recognizing Christ’s authority over the nation by the National Association of Evangelicals (see above).
In 1950, at the founding meeting of the National Council of Churches, they met under the banner, “This Nation under God.”
In 1954, the words “under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance.
In 1955-56, the words “In God We Trust” were added to U.S. currency and became the national motto.
President Eisenhower urged and practiced “civil religion,” opening his cabinet meetings with prayer and reading a prayer at his inauguration.

Of course, all three of these streams that we’ve described today ran white. However, in the post-war years, another huge cultural movement in the U.S. was gaining momentum. It found its voice in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and along with other countercultural movements of liberation, added a whole new set of ingredients to the mixture of politics and religion in the U.S.

Independence Day 2016

We who live in the U.S. celebrate our Independence Day today.

Let us express our thanks to God for his common grace of giving us the opportunity to live in this land. Let us offer prayers for wisdom, peace, and justice today and in days to come, for our own nation and for all our neighbors in the world.

We, the people without a race,
Without a language;
Of all races, and of none;
Of all tongues, and one imposed;
Of all traditions and all pasts,
With no tradition and no past.
A patchwork and an altar-piece,
Vague as sea-mist,
Myriad as forest-trees,
Living into a present,
Building a future.

From “The Congressional Library”
by Amy Lowell

Pic & Poem of the Week: July 3, 2016

28045978255_85d321d892_k — Chicago Skyline

Pic & Poem of the Week
July 3, 2016

For your pleasure and contemplation, I am posting an original photograph and a corresponding poem each week on Sundays. May these offerings help lead us to a deeper place of rest on the Lord’s Day.

Click on the picture for a larger image.

• • •

From “Chicago”

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,

Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding…

Carl Sandburg
From “Chicago”

Saturday Ramblings: July 2, 2016

We’re in Chicago for the weekend, enjoying music and walking around the city. The picture above is from the 1960 Chicago Auto Show, an event I attended a few times back when I was a teen. Note how Rambler was being advertised back in those days: Rambler: Basic Excellence.

That’s what we try to give you every day here at Internet Monk, and on Saturdays we hop in the old Rambler and cruise the WWW for interesting material. Come on, let’s ramble!

• • •

Speaking of rambling, buckle your seatbelts, keep your eye on the road, and get ready for a whole new thing.

In May, Joshua D. Brown of Canton, Ohio, the 40-year-old owner of a technology company, became the first person to die in a crash involving a self-driving automobile.

Brown was riding in his beloved Tesla S sedan, watching a Harry Potter movie, when his car’s cameras failed to distinguish the white side of a turning tractor trailer from a brightly lit sky and didn’t automatically activate its brakes.

In April, Brown posted a video on YouTube showing how his Tesla had avoided a crash on an interstate.

In the fatal incident, Brown had put the car in “Autopilot” mode. Tesla said in a statement that this was the first known death in over 130 million miles of Autopilot operation. They also said that the system is an “assist feature” that requires a driver to keep both hands on the wheel at all time. Drivers are told they need to “maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle” while using the system, and they have to be prepared to take over at any time.

Unless Harry Potter is on, I guess.

This, of course, was the week of Brexit.

We’ll leave it to the pundits to sort out the analysis and predictions for what the fallout may be. What we here at IM want to know is, what do British comedians think about all of this?

Here are a few of the responses:

Oh, and one other very important question: What happens to BEER after Brexit?

Over at UPROXX, Stacey Ritzen posted some hilarious cartoons about one of the presidential candidates, which our friend Mike the Geologist brought them to our attention. I’ll let Ritzen explain the concept:

Calvin, the protagonist in Bill Watterson’s beloved comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, is a 6-year-old boy prone to irrational outbursts, delusions of grandeur, and the occasional whimsy of taking over the world. Donald Trump the real-estate mogul, former reality-television star, and current presidential candidate, is also prone to irrational outbursts, delusions of grandeur, and… I guess you can see where we’re going with this, here.

At some point, some brilliant person happened to notice the similarities between the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States and a frigging fictional 6-year-old child, and the subreddit r/DonaldandHobbes was born. The conceit is fairly simple: contributors superimpose The Donald’s head over Calvin’s head in Calvin and Hobbes strips, and viola! Satire is born.

Here are a few of them. Visit HERE to see the rest.

The Rambler is feeling all bipartisan today, so we now present a few of the best Hillary Clinton cartoons we’ve seen recently:

Pope Francis recently said that the Church owes gays an apology for the way it has marginalized and mistreated them over the years.

The pontiff was responding to remarks by German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, a top adviser to the pope. A few days earlier, Marx had said that the Catholic Church, as well as society, had treated gay people in a “scandalous and terrible” way.

Francis was asked about Marx’s remarks and the Orlando killings and about suggestions that Christians need to examine their own consciences when it comes to the treatment of gays and lesbians.

Francis shook his head in grief at the mention of Orlando and recalled church teachings that homosexuals “should not be discriminated against” and “should be respected, accompanied pastorally.”

Then he added: “I think that the church not only should apologize … to a gay person whom it offended, but it must also apologize to the poor as well, to the women who have been exploited, to children who have been exploited by (being forced to) work.”

Christians, he reiterated, “must ask forgiveness, not just say sorry.”

That didn’t sit well with some Catholics, including South African Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, who tweeted “God help us! Next we’ll have to apologize for teaching that adultery is a sin! Political Correctness (PC) is today’s major heresy!”

President of the Catholic League, Bill Donohue was just as adamant.

“As a matter of fact, I want an apology from gays,” Donohue said on CNN’s “New Day” program. “I’ve been assaulted by gays. I’ve never assaulted a gay person in my entire life.”

“(T)he idea of a blanket apology because you are a member of some demographic group, I mean, I don’t know what church teaching it is that you have a problem with that maybe the church should apologize for?”

Does Jesus still appear and perform miracles, as described in the Gospels? Some people claim he does. A couple of articles this week caught the Rambler’s attention.

First, at a sight called GodReports, Mark Ellis reports that Jesus appears to a group of refugees crossing the stormy Aegean Sea and calmed the waters, saving them.

When the wind and the waves threatened to swamp a boat filled with refugees fleeing the Middle East, Jesus made a dramatic appearance to them and calmed the waters, saving their lives.

The truly amazing account is from Erick Schenkel, executive director of the Jesus Film Project.

“A group of refugees fleeing the fighting in the Middle East were jammed into several pontoon boats. They were trying to make it across the Aegean Sea to Greece,” Schenkel recounts.

The seas were extremely rough and dangerous and some of the boats in this small armada capsized.

The report is reminiscent of a similar storm on the Sea of Galilee described in the Gospel accounts, when “A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped.” (Matthew 4:37)

The refugees were afraid, just as Jesus’ fellow travelers were frightened.

“But the people in one boat cried out to God. Suddenly, a ‘shining heavenly figure’ appeared in the boat,” Schenkel reports. “The entire boat knew it was Jesus.”

Then something miraculous happened. Jesus calmed the storm!

“From that point the sea became calm and peaceful, and they finally landed safely on shore.”

In another, more general article (meaning no specific stories were told), a Christian apologist named Dr. Jeremiah Johnston claims that “Jesus is appearing to Muslims all over the Middle Eastern world.”

Well, okay. What’s a Christian to do with this? Accept it because somebody said so?

Would I be less of a believer if I said I was skeptical?

On Thursday night, Gail and I attended one of best concerts we’ve seen. We saw James Taylor and special guest Jackson Browne at Wrigley Field in Chicago. My favorite city, favorite venue, favorite singer-songwriter along with another of my favorite singer-songwriters, and I enjoyed it all with my favorite person.

All I have to say is: Man, there were a lot of old people there!

No, seriously, it was phenomenal. This being the age we live in, there are already several amateur videos out on YouTube, but the quality is not great so I won’t post any of them here. Instead, I offer this performance of “Carolina in My Mind” from Taylor’s One Man Band tour a few years ago. This was the first song Apple Records released by a non-British artist, and is reportedly James Taylor’s own favorite.

It certainly is one of mine.

Another Look: The Wilderness Within

They cannot scare me with their empty places
Between stars — on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

• Robert Frost, “Desert Places”

• • •

One temptation is to think the wilderness is without — a place, a geography, a circumstance. I’m in the wilderness, I say, and immediately I find myself off course. Yes, the place under my feet may be a desert and barren all around. But more likely, even though it is there, I cannot see its fruit or the means it offers for my survival. It may well be that I can flourish in almost any setting. Only the aquifer must be found and I must sink a sturdy pipe through hard dry soil to reach it. That I struggle to do so consistently is the scary part and what makes me view the wilderness as the enemy. It demands from me more than I seem to be able to summons. The barren place without reveals my impotence and lack of creative imagination within.

Therefore, more often than not, I take an easier way made possible by this age of miracles. I go into debt to buy overpriced, mediocre quality groceries. I put the cost of a vacation at the nearest oasis on my credit card, and there I read brochures extolling greener pastures. I fall asleep, drunk on dreams. Then two weeks later I awaken and open my front door, and here I am again in the midst of a trackless wasteland. I squint against the blowing dust that slaps my face and feel myself beginning to sweat. The midday demon slowly chokes the breath out of me. I survive the afternoon, parched and overwhelmed with futility. I twist and turn in perspiration-soaked sheets through the night, both longing for and dreading the morning.

Not in a million years would I have thought, in these days, that my main vocation would be searching for water.

This is the Gospel?

No one in the Bible, when described in a judgment scene, is asked if they accepted, trusted, or embraced the soterian gospel. In other words, “Did you accept Jesus into your heart consciously?” or “Did you walk the aisle to receive Christ?” or “Did you accept that Christ was your righteousness?” No one.

• Scot McKnight

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Over at RedState, Leon H. Wolf is reporting that “James Dobson doesn’t want to be a sucker for Donald Trump anymore.”

This is a follow-up to an earlier piece Wolf wrote, called “Evangelical Leaders Continue to Prove that there’s a Sucker Born Every Minute,” in which he remarked,

You don’t have to be an exceptionally cynical person to believe that Trump is manifestly not a Christian, and is cynically using Christians for his electoral purposes; you just have to be a person with a brain and a passing familiarity with Christianity. Throughout the entirety of his public life he has made it abundantly clear that he has no interest in Christianity or anything it teaches, and his behavior on the campaign trail has done nothing but reinforce that.

Nevertheless, on the campaign trail he has suckered a good number of Evangelicals in spite of saying absurd things like, “I can’t tell you what my favorite Bible verse is because that’s too personal,” and “I’ve never felt the need to ask for God’s forgiveness,” and “Okay I’ll tell you what my favorite Bible verse is, it’s that part in Two Corinthians where the Bible says you’re supposed to take an eye for an eye.” Nothing about Trump’s persona, his platform, or his policy is even remotely Christian but he tells Evangelicals he is one of them and some of them feel content to throw aside their critical thinking skills altogether and believe him.

Apparently Dobson is now walking back his assertion about Trump’s “born again experience.” On top of that, Dobson revealed that the person who supposedly led Donald Trump to the Lord is noted prosperity gospel preacher Paula White, not exactly a credible source of information about theological matters. The whole thing is just plain embarrassing.

Why do I bring up this story? Let me say at the outset that I don’t really give a rat’s behind about the political angles here. It is just another crazy circus story from Big Top 2016 as far as I’m concerned.

What does bother me, though, is how the “gospel” of American evangelicalism is represented in this story.

Seriously, this is the gospel? Whether Dobson is retracting what he said about the Donald or not, I don’t hear him clarifying his understanding of the gospel he said Trump “accepted.” I don’t hear him suggesting he was misquoted or misunderstood about what he meant by someone being “born again.” The “gospel” he talked about was appallingly shallow and transactional.

Though I had a spiritual awakening as a teenager in a revivalistic Southern Baptist Church, walked the aisle, and “accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior,” and though at the time I thought that was the proper “procedure,” and though I continued to live and minister in a Christian culture for many years that emphasized “making a decision for Christ” and “leading others to Christ” by having them pray a prayer and “receive” Jesus, it never felt quite right to me. As though entering God’s Kingdom is like a simple transaction, like purchasing a ticket and reserving a seat on the train to glory. As though it has always been understood in biblical times and throughout church history that all a person has to do is bow his head and pray a simple prayer to be transformed and alter his entire earthly and eternal destiny.

In my view, Dobson sounded foolish not because he might have been gullible about Donald Trump, but a thousand times more because of the facile, superficial gospel message he represented in his statements. This is what Scot McKnight calls the “soterian” gospel in extremis. An individualistic, commercial transaction. Jesus paid the fee, I got the ticket. I get to go to heaven because I prayed a prayer. Jesus gets to forgive me and have me on his side.

In another post, I wrote about a much more robust message of good news that I believe to be more faithful to the biblical story:

The gospel is an announcement of a public event that has taken place, an event which has changed everything. It is not advice or instruction given to us, it is a proclamation that Jesus has become King, that God has taken charge of the world through the finished work of the Messiah. God has established his rule of justice and peace in the world. God’s enemies have been defeated and will not win the war. The resurrection, ascension, and outpouring of the Spirit means that the new era has been inaugurated. It’s a new day. The divine process of transforming the world has begun in earnest. The announcement of this gospel invites all who hear it to embrace the good news and become part of the transformation. “If anyone is in Christ — new creation!” (2Cor. 5:17, literal translation). The person herself becomes renewed, but even more than that, she becomes part of God’s new creation here and now, right in the midst of this present life. Through baptism she dies to the old creation and is “raised to walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).

God has taken charge of the world. Everything has changed. The new world has begun in Christ, who has taken his throne.

Inviting people to participate in this good news is not about getting them to pray a prayer, walk an aisle, receive Jesus into their heart, or believe in a “plan of salvation.” It means inviting them to enter a new world, leaving behind the old one. It is about Jesus front and center, and changing one’s loyalty from Caesar to Christ. Using the image of new birth, it means entering a new family and beginning the process of growing up within that household. It’s akin to someone in our culture enlisting in military service. You walk through the gate and you are no longer your own. You no longer live in the civilian world. You better get ready for a new life.

These changes are profound and life-altering. That is why, in yet another post about the gospel, I explored the idea that church traditions have not taken the matter of conversion as lightly as today’s evangelicals do, as represented in the recent statements by James Dobson. In that article I argued that churches have traditionally presented a “structured gospel” — that is, a gospel that brings forgiveness and freedom to obey, which comes through ordered means that provide clarity for the life of faith through disciplined practices.

As an example, I considered the story of Saul, who became the Apostle Paul. Contrary to the common assumption that Paul’s life was transformed in a moment, the New Testament accounts describe a process of conversion. On the Damascus Road, Jesus got Paul’s attention in a dramatic fashion, and introduced himself to him, yes. But then, before ever saying a word about forgiveness or salvation, the risen Lord sent him to the church. There, through such community practices as fasting, solitude, prayer, the laying on of hands, baptism, and public witness, Paul became a thoroughly converted, changed man. And then, if you read Paul’s own recollection in Galatians 1, after that he dropped out of sight, living in obscurity for three years before going to Jerusalem to meet with church leaders and present himself for ministry. N.T. Wright suggests that this may have been Paul’s “Elijah” period, when he was learning that zeal for the Law must be replaced by suffering for a crucified Messiah. A thorough conversion in the context of community, with means and a process.

And we have “the sinner’s prayer.” We have people like Paula White “leading Saul to Christ.” Please.

There are many ways in which I have come to see that contemporary evangelical faith is a cartoon faith — a flat, colorful, but ultimately childish caricature of what the Bible and church tradition have given us. There’s little humanity in it. Little depth. Little that resonates with the actual human experiences of struggling and growing and becoming mature human beings of faith, hope, and love together, planting seeds for a harvest of righteousness in the new creation.

Whatever James Dobson was talking about, it wasn’t the gospel.

Wednesdays with James: Lesson Five

Blessings on people who are persecuted because of God’s way! The kingdom of heaven belongs to you. Blessings on you, when people slander you and persecute you, and say all kinds of wicked things about you falsely because of me! Celebrate and rejoice: there’s a great reward for you in heaven. That’s how they persecuted the prophets who went before you.

• Matthew 5:10-12, KNT

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Wednesdays with James
Lesson Five: Eschatological Joy and Growth through Suffering (aka Life)

We are taking an adaptation of Peter Davids’s outline as our “big picture” of the Epistle of James.

Today we’ll start to look at the text itself, which begins after the epistolary introduction of verse 1. Our focus today will be on James 1:2-4 (we’ll cover bigger chunks in future lessons). We are using N.T. Wright’s New Testament text, The Kingdom New Testament: A Contemporary Translation.

My dear family, when you find yourselves tumbling into various trials and tribulations, learn to look at it with complete joy, because you know that, when your faith is put to the test, what comes out is patience. What’s more, you must let patience have its complete effect, so that you may be complete and whole, not falling short in anything.

As per Peter Davids, this paragraph introduces the first of James’s three major themes: the genuineness of faith will be tested.

In writing this, James suggests that the Jewish believers who read his words should take a particular perspective when it comes to facing all kinds of tests, trials, and difficulties in life. The specific troubles they are dealing with will be introduced soon, in verses 9-11, but before focusing in to their exact circumstances, he reminds them of good news that Jesus himself taught (Matt. 5:10-12, see above). When Jesus uttered similar words, he encouraged his listeners to look back, to see themselves as part of a long line of God’s people who had endured suffering, people God had rewarded and honored. James, on the other hand, encourages his readers to look forward, to see themselves as part of the blessed community of the last days who, like their Savior, would emerge from suffering to receive the glorious kingdom of God.

When James says, “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials,” he is urging them to pursue a particular kind of joy. Peter Davids calls it “eschatological joy,” the joy “of those expecting the intervention of God in the end of the age.” He is not encouraging them to seek out trouble, nor is he saying they should gloss over it with a patina of smiles and clichés. Suffering is real, painful, and not something anyone should want. But James (like Paul and Peter in their epistles) sees “an ultimate eschatological benefit in the suffering.”

Wisdom teaching throughout all the world, all religions, and all philosophies has spoken to the question of human suffering, and by and large has encouraged people to embrace it and allow it to make us stronger, better people. Here James follows this same pattern, with an eschatological twist because of the new reality created by Jesus. He is not so much exploring “why” suffering occurs but rather how a wise person — in particular a follower of the suffering and exalted Savior — will view it in the long term. In the final analysis, he affirms, no ultimate harm will befall the believer, who will emerge in the end “complete and whole, not falling short in anything.”

But James also speaks to the process and formation that suffering may bring along the way. One who learns to take a long view of suffering can develop patience or endurance. We see this in all manner of examples around us in the world: athletes who put themselves through tortuous training to make themselves better in competition, soldiers who drill tirelessly and are exposed to extreme conditions to toughen them for battle, business entrepreneurs who sacrifice normal lives in the short term to build better futures, ordinary folks who deny themselves instant gratification in all manner of things to pursue deeper pleasures and greater prosperity.

I’m convinced that 90% of our “discipleship” or “Christian growth” programs are well-intentioned but ultimately getting it wrong. They rely primarily upon conveying certain information and urging certain behaviors. All well and good, but it seems clear to me that there is only one real way to “grow” as a Christian (by which I mean become a mature and loving human being), and that is by actually going through life, with its many trials of prosperity and adversity and everything in between.

We grow by living, and that means we grow through suffering. We become mature by gaining experience and perspective, and though books (including the Bible) can help us conceptualize some of what that means, experience and perspective must be worked into us. Maturity can’t be taught, only developed. The “patience” James commends is the outworking of real life processes in real life settings with real life choices and adaptations. God does not give us patience, he works it into us through life experience. Virtue is not the result of education in the narrow sense of academic achievement but in the broad sense of letting life and our responses to it (the arena in which God works) form us.

This is the life God is in. He is leading us to the age to come, in which all will be made new. But until then, we who follow Jesus can (and must) participate in the daily process, anticipate the end result, and learn to practice the patience of hope.

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Wednesdays with James
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