Hello friends. We are letting the good Chaplain have a Saturday off this week (he’s traveling to Texas to see if Joel Osteen will give a blurb for his book). So you are stuck with me. Ready to Ramble?
1955 Rambler with Swamp Cooler*
Speaking of our good friend Joel, did you know that Morgan Freeman recently popped in to interview him? Freeman, you see, is hosting a six-part TV special for the National Geographic channel titled, “The Story of God”. In this role, he visited Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, Cairo’s mosques, Guatemala’s Mayan temples, India’s Bodhi Tree, Neolithic Turkish settlements, the Vatican . . . and . . . [wait for it] . . .Osteen’s Lakewood Church. No, I am not making this up. Yes, I really wish I was.
“One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn’t belong”
Through the Field…another walk, Photo by David Cornwell
Little children, I’m writing to you because your sins have been forgiven through Jesus’ name. Parents, I’m writing to you because you have known the one who has existed from the beginning. Young people, I’m writing to you because you have conquered the evil one. Little children, I write to you because you know the Father. Parents, I write to you because you have known the one who has existed from the beginning. Young people, I write to you because you are strong, the word of God remains in you, and you have conquered the evil one.
• 1John 2:12-14 CEB
• • •
One fact I did not understand when I was younger is that life is made up of different seasons and circumstances that can virtually define any given time in life, or even the entirety of your life. I could hardly grasp that I would be called to adapt and change and learn and respond differently — sometimes for extended periods of time — regarding aspects of life over which I would have little control. I still find it hard to deal with change and disruption of my plans and expectations. And if this is true of me, one who has lived a relatively trouble-free life, what of others who have faced monumental challenges and tragic life-altering situations?
A lot of “discipleship” does not take this into account either, but comes across as generic and all-purpose, a program for all audiences — read your Bible, pray, get involved in church, find places to serve.
What they never tell you is that you and life and God and work and relationships and the way you think about all these things and what you need to flourish in life and love is different at age 22 than it is at 35 and very different at 50 or 65. Discipleship programs rarely, if ever, let you in on the secret that you may have to trudge through vast swaths of wilderness in your life, hungry and thirsty, exhausted and threatened by heat stroke. Nor do they talk about the challenges of good times and the temptations of prosperity and the successful seasons of life and the fact that they may or may not contribute to one’s personal growth.
They also don’t take into account that each person has his or her own inner landscape, climate, and weather — that life with its seasons and circumstances looks and feels somewhat different to each individual.
There is a conformist tendency in institutional religion which suggests that because we’re all in this together, we must learn to deal with life in basically the same manner. This effectively disregards the apprenticeship approach Jesus took with his disciples and the apostles’ insistence that we live in the freedom of the Spirit.
This presents a great challenge for ministers and congregations who want to encourage spiritual formation in their churches. Taking each person’s unique situation into account and responding with grace and edifying love can be daunting.
Brothers and sisters, we ask you to respect those who are working with you, leading you, and instructing you. Think of them highly with love because of their work. Live in peace with each other. Brothers and sisters, we urge you to warn those who are disorderly. Comfort the discouraged. Help the weak. Be patient with everyone. Make sure no one repays a wrong with a wrong, but always pursue the good for each other and everyone else.
• 1Thess 5:12-15 CEB
There are many aspects of church life in which we are called to be formed in Christ together — worship through Word and Sacrament and catechesis, to name two — nevertheless all of us must also learn to walk in newness of life as individuals who have died and been raised up in Christ.
As a parent, one of the most surprising things I had to face was how different each of my children would be. I had to learn how to balance giving attention to their individual stories with composing our larger family story. This is the same challenge the church faces. There is no one-size-fits-all discipleship “program.” Run as fast as you can from any church that gives you the impression they think there is.
Another false notion about the seasons and circumstances of spiritual formation is that they lead to perceptible progress in the believer’s life. As though there is a definable pattern of personal development. Over the years, the spiritual life has been likened to a journey. That suggests a road with recognizable landmarks and destinations. It has also been envisioned in terms of climbing a ladder, though Protestants have usually been suspicious of this as advocating a system of meritorious works. And this is not a leftover relic from medieval theology. Mission statements of many contemporary churches are quite explicit that they expect certain measurable evidences of “growth” to become apparent in the lives of their members.
The movements of the Spirit, Nouwen observed within himself and in others, tend to come in cycles throughout our lives, with only a broad and hardly predictable progressive order. Instead of stepping up to higher and higher stages, as if achieving one stage leads to the next level and the next, we tend to vacillate back and forth between the poles that we seek to resolve. We move “from fear to love” and then back “from love to fear,” for example in a dynamic process that is never complete. Rather than resolving the tensions once and for all, the movements continue to call us to conversion and transformation.
As I’ve said before, this leads me to be reticent about promoting the idea of “growth” or “transformation” as though this is something that can be clearly observed or that “progress” can be marked as an unambiguous fact. As Nouwen himself writes:
After many years of seeking to live a spiritual life, I still ask myself, “Where am I as a Christian?” — “How far have I advanced?” — “Do I love God more now than earlier in my life?” — “Have I matured in faith since I started on the spiritual path?” Honestly, I don’t know the answers to these questions. There are just as many reasons for pessimism as for optimism. Many of the real struggles of twenty or forty years ago are still very much with me. I am still searching for inner peace, for creative relationships with others, and for a deeper experience of God. And I have no way of knowing if the small psychological and spiritual changes during the past decades have made me more or less a spiritual person.
…it is of great importance that we leave the world of measurements behind when we speak about the life of the Spirit.
Seasons come and seasons go. We travel onward in our journey with Christ. Where we are on the road at any given point in time is debatable from our point of view. What we can know, and what we must cling to, is that Christ has called and enabled us to be with him on the road, that he is with us, that he will not forsake us, and that he picks us up every time we fall.
The Lord directs the steps of the godly. He delights in every detail of their lives. Though they stumble, they will never fall, for the Lord holds them by the hand.
In the last essay I asserted that all truth is God’s truth. Therefore the revelation of God through nature and the revelation of God through the bible cannot contradict; they are in perfect harmony. However, because of our fallible human understanding of both science and scripture there are inevitably going to be conflicts in our interpretation of natural phenomena or in our interpretation of scripture. We should neither be surprised nor dismayed.
I also asserted that the so called “plain reading” of scripture should not always dictate what our scientific conclusions should be. Clearly most of us now understand the Bible passages that refer to the rising and setting of the sun are based on the way the ancients observed the phenomena; in fact we continue to use the terminology as convenient. But we don’t base our modern technology on the ancient understanding of natural phenomena. What part of the firmament does NASA fire its rockets into? Was anyone surprised that Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin proclaimed that “I went up to space, but I didn’t encounter God?” Was there really anyone who expected him to? (Ironically, Gagarin never said such a thing, and was, in fact, a Christian.) No, as I said earlier, we simply understand those passages in their native scientific context, make the appropriate adjustments according to our scientific expectations, and move on… (Credit again to Gordon Glover and his Science and Christian Education series).
So how should we do science? Google the Merriam-Webster definition of science and you get: “knowledge about or study of the natural world based on facts learned through experiments and observation”. Note that the knowledge science deals with is not the only knowledge there is. Science is not a belief system nor a worldview. I don’t believe in “science” rather than believe in God.
In my profession as a geologist I practice methodological naturalism. I assemble the facts based on observation or experiment and formulate a hypothesis about what those facts mean. I test that hypothesis based on what predictions would be made if it were true and then test those predictions by gathering additional observations or experiments. The additional data either confirms the hypothesis or I modify the hypothesis according to the new facts. A dry cleaners has a spill of dry cleaning fluid. Does that spill pose a threat to nearby drinking water wells, and if so, how much of a threat. I drill monitoring wells between the spill and the drinking water wells. I collect water levels; are the drinking water wells downgradient or upgradient of the spill? I collect water samples; the presence of the contaminant is confirmed or not. And so I build my case until I reach the most probable conclusion. Notice I said “most probable conclusion”. The scientific method rarely proves anything absolutely. There is always further refinement as new data continues to accumulate. Did I conclude the drinking water wells not at risk? Maybe I didn’t screen the sampling wells in the right formation and missed the contaminant plume. Did I begin detecting the dry cleaning fluid in the drinking water wells? Maybe there is more than one source I hadn’t accounted for. You get the idea I hope.
One thing I do not do. I do not consider the supernatural. It’s funny in my profession you are always encountering people who want to know what you think about “water witching”. Do I ever locate wells by witching them; no I tell them. And then I get the anecdote about uncle or grandpa and how the “witch” located the best water when no one else could yada, yada, and so on. I always smile and just move on.
Well, why don’t I consider the supernatural? It’s not because I am a philosophical materialist. Philosophic Materialism is a worldview which states the physical or material universe is all there is. I don’t believe that. I believe there is more than just matter and energy. I believe in Jesus, that he raised from the dead, and is God as He claimed to be. And I don’t believe there is any scientific (i.e. natural) explanation for that resurrection, it’s a faith claim.
Perhaps a more mundane example will illustrate my point… and will have the additional advantage of showing that you, dear reader, practice methodological naturalism yourselves. Again, borrowing from Gordon Glover, suppose you need to be somewhere but you’ve lost your keys. How will you go about finding them? Should you consider they’ve been “spirited away by some supernatural force?
Maybe God is protecting you from a deadly car accident… But even if that’s the case, that’s not going to help you physically find the keys. You really don’t have any practical way to deal with those scenarios… Even if you pray for God to help you find them, it’s not going to do any good to just wait for God to drop them into your lap. And if they’ve been “spirited away” to some other dimension, what’s the point of even looking for them. Your only hope of finding them is to organize a material based “scientific” search for them by systematically re-tracing your steps; i.e. assume a methodological naturalism.
A biblical worldview should not fear or reject Naturalism if we are only talking about a method of investigation. Not every problem we approach or every question we have can or should be solved or answered by methodological naturalism. An excellent example of that is discussed in this Jesus Creed post on the free will issue. But I am going to assert with a high degree of conviction that questions that submit themselves to material cause and effect explanations, such as those questions we usually ask under the banner of science, should be approached with methodological naturalism.
Another way of thinking about it is that methodological naturalism is the systematic study of God’s Ordinary Providence i.e. the regular observed patterns of material behavior that is the sum total of all the physical laws of nature. It is this very ordinary-ness or the uniformity of nature that allows us to systematically investigate the cosmos according to its regular workings.
God is not bound by the ordinary laws of nature the He Himself instituted. I believe He can and does, at His discretion, choose to intervene or suspend the ordinary workings of His sustaining power… which we call miracles. But remember, His ordinary laws of nature are no less His workings. That is the mistaken dichotomy of modernism. I believe the ancient authors of the Bible did not make this division, to them it was all God. So when Jesus turned water into wine, God bypassed the normal means to glorify and point to His Son. By His ordinary means He is turning water into wine all the time…
Psalm 104:14 — He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth; And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man’s heart.
Science can only comment on the ordinary process of wine making, it can have nothing to say about the miraculous process…NOTHING!
But on the other hand there is nothing more spiritual about miracles than about the usual way God goes about doing things.
Guyton and his wife Cheryl are co-directors of the NOLA Wesley Foundation, the United Methodist campus ministry at Tulane and Loyola University in New Orleans, LA. He blogs at Mercy Not Sacrifice.
Guyton is known as a “progressive” Christian, and his book and the article list a series of emphases that he claims distinguish such Christianity from “toxic” Christianity.
Second, here at Internet Monk, we’ve tended to focus more on neo-puritan and ancient-future reactions to evangelicalism, and I think it worth exploring the so-called “progressive” stream (we used to say “emerging” to describe many of them) more fully.
Third, as I get older, I don’t want to become one of those curmudgeons that can’t show generosity and grace to those who are younger and are in the process of figuring things out when it comes to their faith journey and how it relates to the church at large.
So, I want to take a little time with this book over the next few weeks.
We start today with Morgan Guyton’s introduction, which begins with the provocative question: “Have Christians become what Jesus came to stop us from being?”
As a member of U.S. evangelical culture, the author finds himself troubled by the sneaking suspicion that “the loudest Christian voices today sound so much like the religious authorities who crucified Jesus”. How can this be?
Some place the ultimate blame on Constantine, some on Augustine. Others point the finger at the medieval nominalists. Guyton recognizes that there have always been Christians who displayed a beautiful, attractive faith, but still he laments, “it seems as if the loud, mean Christians are the ones who always win.”
Then he asks a question meant to startle us into a new way of thinking:
How would Christians live differently if we believed that Jesus needs to save the world from us?
Are we troubled enough by what we’ve become that we earnestly want Jesus to save the world from our Christianity?
Morgan Guyton will proceed through this book to identify twelve toxic Christian attitudes and their antidotes.
But for today, let’s just meditate on the big question he raises.
Who do we in the church resemble more today:
those who “turned the world upside down” through lives of self-giving love, being willing to die so that the life of Jesus might flow from us for the life of the world?
or those who crucified Jesus out of genuine allegiance to God in order to protect their religious system and way of life?
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.
Dan McElhinny, a public historian who works for the state of Oregon, wrote the following in a review of Fea’s book, which he sent personally to the author:
John Fea produces a historical primer with spine for “anyone who wants to make sense of America’s early history and its relationship to Christianity”. By selecting a subject of profound civic importance and examining it with passion, Fea demonstrates the value of professional historical practice. Using care in topic selection and applying key concepts called the Five C’s of historical scholarship, Fea expresses a genuine faith in human’s use of history. By example, he helps the reader understand and use skills to identify bad from good history.
This is John Fea’s concern: that we get the history right. He approaches the question “Was America founded as a Christian nation?” as a historian, using accepted guidelines of good historical study. Noting that the question has become a contentious issue in our time, and that people are regularly throwing out claims and counterclaims about the subject, he writes:
We live in a sound-bite culture that makes it difficult to have any sustained dialogue on these historical issues. It is easy for those who argue that America is a Christian nation (and those who do not) to appear on radio or television programs, quote from one of the founders or one of the nation’s founding documents, and sway people to their positions. These kinds of arguments, which can often be contentious, do nothing to help us unravel a very complicated historical puzzle about the relationship between Christianity and America’s founding.
…I have written this book for the historically minded and thoughtful reader who is looking for help in sorting it all out. I have tried to avoid polemics as much as possible, although I am sure that my treatment of these controversial issues will not please everyone. This book should be viewed as a historical primer for students, churchgoers, and anyone who wants to make sense of the American past and its relationship to Christianity. I hope it might be read and discussed in schools and congregations where people are serious about considering how the history of the American founding era might help them to become more informed citizens in the present.
Fea’s first chapters, then, are about history, studying history, what historians do, and what makes “good” or “bad” historical study. He recognizes that, in some ways, this does not come naturally to Americans, who have tended to look forward rather than backward, attaching themselves “to the train of progress.”
On the other hand, history has also been a subject of great interest, because “it is our natural impulse to find something useful in the past.” We look to it for inspiration, for a sense of continuity and familiarity with those who went before us, and to help us understand our present identity as citizens of the United States.
As soon as the United States was founded, historians began writing about the meaning of the American Revolution in an attempt to remind us of the values and ideals for which it was waged. History is a tool for strengthening the nation. It reminds us of where we came from and helps us chart where we are going. American history has always been a way of teaching children lessons in patriotism. History helps produce good citizens. We need the stories of our past to sustain us as a people. In America we study it to understand the values and beliefs that we as a people are willing to fight for and die for. We wish that our children and their children would learn the stories of the past and in the process embrace the beliefs that have defined the American experiment since its birth over two hundred years ago. This is why historical debates, such as the one currently being waged over whether the United States of America is a Christian nation, are so intense. The identity of the country is at stake.
But at this point, John Fea asks us to stop and remember something absolutely essential: “Historians do not approach the past with the primary goal of finding something relevant.”
Instead, historians take up the task of historical study and interpretation using methods formed by the “Five C’s of Historical Thinking.”
Change over time. The historian’s task is to chronicle the changes that have occurred over the course of generations and to uncover the processes which have created a gulf between the present and the past as well as to note the ways in which our human experience has remained relatively stable.
Context. Historians study the past in the context of the times and places in which past events occurred. Documents must be interpreted from the perspective of the world in which they were produced.
Causality. Historians form arguments, using such tools as change over time and context, about why things happened in the past the way they did. This is not a simple task, for it is likely that there are multiple explanations for why any particular past event occurred. Therefore, the study, interpretation, and teaching of history usually involves lively, ongoing debates about the relative contributions of any number of factors in causing past changes. There may be no simple explanations or answers.
Contingency. “To argue that history is contingent is to claim that every historical outcome depends upon a number of prior conditions; that each of these prior conditions depends, in turn, upon still other conditions; and so on. The core insight of contingency is that the world is a magnificently interconnected place” (Andrews and Burke). From a Christian perspective, this suggests that, although God may be working out providential purposes in history, we cannot necessarily know or define those purposes, nor is it the historian’s task to try and explain them. Instead, the historian looks at the ways specific humans in specific times and places shaped the course of events and how various historical moments are connected to other historical moments.
Complexity. Once more, from Andrews and Burke: “Chronicles distill intricate historical processes into a mere catalogue, while nostalgia conjures an uncomplicated golden age that saves us the trouble of having to think about the past. Our own need for order can obscure our understanding of how past worlds functioned and blind us to the ways in which myths of rosy pasts do political and cultural work in the present. Reveling in complexity rather than shying away from it, historians seek to dispel the power of chronicle, nostalgia, and other traps that obscure our ability to understand the past on its own terms.”
John Fea is critical of many Christian spokespersons who “use” history rather than “study” history:
Most human beings tend to be present-minded when it comes to confronting the past. The discipline of history was never meant to function as a means of getting one’s political point across or convincing people to join a cause. Yet Americans use the past for these purposes all the time. Such an approach to the past can easily degenerate into a form of propaganda or, as the historian Bernard Bailyn described it, “indoctrination by historical example.”
This sort of present-mindedness is very common among those Christian writers and preachers who defend the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation. They enter the past with the preconceived purpose of trying to find the religious roots of the United States. If they are indeed able to gather evidence suggesting that the founders were Christians or believed that the promotion of religion was important to the success of the Republic, then they have gotten all that they need from the past. It has served them adequately as a tool for promoting a particular twenty-first-century political agenda. It has provided ammunition to win the cultural war in which they are engaged. Gordon Wood has said that if someone wants to use the study of the past to change the world he should forgo a career as a historian and run for office!
Instead, he urges us to let history humble us. Let it remind us that we are not autonomous but part of a human story larger than ourselves. Let it teach us the limitations of our knowledge and understanding. Let it teach us “intellectual hospitality” — the ability to truly listen to the past and to people and events that in many ways are strange and foreign to us, no matter how familiar we seek to make them.
There is plenty of room for debate. Only let us debate on the basis of genuine historical study, not using the past to bolster our present agenda.
Note from CM: For the next several weeks, we will hear some of what Michael Spencer had to say on the subject of eschatology — the last things. Today, another installment from a series in 2008 called “Too Much Heaven?”
• • •
It is possible that the evangelical version of heaven suffers from two major problems:
It is simply not centered enough in God himself, but emphasizes details that are quite probably metaphorical and meant to be secondary to the central truth that heaven is where God reigns most directly. In other words, heaven is the God-present dimension of all reality, not a place that is located “elsewhere.”
It does not properly emphasize the relationship of heaven and earth, which is not an “either/or” relationship, but a relationship where one is completed by the other. The Paradise in Genesis 1 and Revelation 22 appears to be the “marriage” of heaven and earth in the presence of God himself. Sin has ruptured that harmony, and Jesus Christ, the one mediator between heaven and earth, will once again restore that union.
If this is true, then there is a heavenly aspect to every human activity and the church bears witness to this in Baptism, the Lord’s Supper and its own worship and proclamation. Christians bear witness to this heavenly dimension by sanctifying everything they do with the person of Christ and the centrality of the God revealed in the Gospel.
Listen to the perspective of one of the most “heavenly” passages in the New Testament, Hebrews 12.
But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven. At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken — that is, things that have been mad — in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.
This is not a future event. It is a present event. We are “there” now. We are receiving this permanent “heavenly” kingdom. The permanent triumph of God’s Kingdom is not the removal of God’s people to some distance city beyond space, but the appearance of the New Jerusalem in this world.
This is a much more helpful perspective on heaven, and one that preserves the holiness and sacredness of glorifying God in this world.
As we watch the disciples walking to Emmaus, their shoulders slumped, their faces downcast, their voices muted, how can we imagine their condition? Henri Nouwen suggests:
All had come to nothing. They had lost him. Not just him, but, with him, themselves. The energy that had filled their days and nights had left them completely. They had become two lost human beings, walking home without having a home, returning to what had become a dark memory.
One way to look at life is to see it as a series of losses. Birth itself is a kind of death by which we must lose our comfortable home within the womb in order to gain a new way of living. With every step forward in life, we pass through doors that lead us into new places, but in doing so we also must leave behind what was in the room we just occupied.
Many of these losses we accept as the normal course of life, but even the most benign losses can lead to pain, guilt, regret, and sadness. There are others that seem to turn our worlds upside down, our souls inside out. Nouwen mentions a few:
The losses that settle themselves deeply in our hearts and minds are the loss of intimacy through separations, the loss of safety through violence, the loss of innocence through abuse, the loss of friends through betrayal, the loss of love through abandonment, the loss of home through war, the loss of well being through hunger, heat, and cold, the loss of children through illness or accidents, the loss of country through political upheaval, and the loss of life through earthquakes, floods, plane crashes, bombings, and diseases.
These are the dark losses, the agonizing bereavements by which we lose our dreams, our hopes, our vitality, our sense of self, perhaps even our will to go on living. We may lose faith and fear that our life has utterly lost its meaning. Or we may be beset with a low grade fever of “quiet desperation” that keeps us unsettled day after day. Many of us may be disciplined and strong enough to keep going through the daily routine, perhaps even with a smile on our faces, giving no hint that our hearts have been ransacked and our confidence obliterated. Still, we hurt. We grieve. We struggle.
Nouwen asks the big question we must face at this point:
What to do with our losses? That’s the first question that faces us. Are we hiding them? Are we going to live as if they weren’t real? Are we going to keep them away from our fellow travelers? Are we going to convince ourselves or others that our losses are little compared to our gains? Are we going to blame someone? We do all of these things most of the time, but there is another possibility: the possibility of mourning. Yes, we must mourn our losses. We cannot talk or act them away, but we can shed tears over them and allow ourselves to grieve deeply. To grieve is to allow our losses to tear apart feelings of security and safety and lead us to the painful truth of our brokenness. Our grief makes us experience the abyss of our own life in which nothing is settled, clear, or obvious, but everything constantly shifting and changing.
Luther used the German word afechtung to describe this sense of utter abandonment, this realization at the core of our being that we are lost and perhaps forsaken and without hope. It is at this moment that we cry out, “Kyrie eleison!” and come to the Table offering God the sacrifices of broken and contrite hearts. This is where the service of the Eucharist begins.
However, I appreciate an insight Nouwen shares alongside this emphasis. He observes that when the disciples told the Stranger about their great loss of Jesus, they also told him about other news breaking — strange reports of an empty tomb and visions of angels! They didn’t know what to make of it at that point, but it was enough to get their attention, to lift their heads, if only in curiosity.
Nouwen comments:
That’s how we generally approach the Eucharist. With a strange mixture of despair and hope.
Spotted this week in and around Indianapolis: a lot of folks driving convertibles with the tops down! Yes, we finally cracked the 80 degree mark and made a move toward summer. How I wish I had one of these impressive Nash Ambassadors to tool around town in! And what a sweet paint job! That is one gorgeous machine.
The wind’s in our hair this week as we ramble…
First, let’s get a few quick greetings and comments out there to some prominent newsmakers:
Happy 90th birthday, Queen Elizabeth!
R.I.P. Prince.
Good riddance, Curt Schilling.
Welcome to the $20 bill, Harriet Tubman.
Happy 26th anniversary to the Hubble telescope, which celebrated by releasing a picture of the “Bubble Nebula.”
Bully for Virginia Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe, who signed an order that will allow 206,000 felons who have completed their sentences the right to vote.
R.I.P. Doris Roberts, screen mother who struck loyalty and fear in the hearts of sons everywhere.
Kudos to Cubs pitcher Jake Arrieta, who threw his second career no-hitter in a 16-0 thrashing of the Cincinnati Reds (sorry, Jeff).
It seems that the writing of books on Paul has no end, and I’m struggling to keep up. Heck, I’m still working through N.T. Wright’s two volume set from a couple years ago, as well as the recent massive release from E.P. Sanders, Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought, and the wonderful Paul and the Gift, by John M. G. Barclay. That right there is more than I read on Paul in seminary, and I took specific courses on Pauline theology!
What’s uniquely important about The Apostle Paul and the Christian Life is that it begins unraveling the implications of NPP teaching on what it means to live as a Christian under this theology. The contributors to this volume believe that a New Perspective reading on Paul can offer “a fresh and rich approach as one grapples with the apostle Paul’s understanding of the Christian life” (Introduction)
Gambia’s chapter offers a signal example. We will examine what he says in two parts, today and again one day next week. His article is called, “Participation in the New Creation People of God in Christ by the Spirit.”
Note from CM: Today we welcome a good friend of Internet Monk, Mike McCann, aka Mike the Geologist. It’s nice to have an actual scientist speak to issues of science and faith.
• • •
Science and the Bible (Lesson 1) by Mike McCann
For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a geologist. I read the wonderful “All About” books by famous geologist-adventurer Roy Chapman Andrews and they fired my imagination and started a life-long love affair with science. I know it must have seemed precocious when a 5 year old was asked “what do you want to be when you grow up” and instead of the expected answer of fireman, policeman, cowboy, etc. was answered “geologist”. But there it was, and I never wavered in my commitment finally obtaining a Master of Science in Geology in 1978.
I was raised a Roman Catholic but during the teen years became an atheist. That was probably more related to teen rebellion than any intellectual conviction, as I reflect on it now, but I bought the argument that knowledge by science was the only reliable knowledge possible. During my undergraduate years I had a conversion experience related to the “Jesus Movement” and became a born-again evangelical. Thus began my experience with the conflict between “science” and the “Bible”.
Up until then, it had never occurred to me to question what I had learned in my geology classes. During my atheist phase the Bible was, of course, merely a human book, not to be taken seriously. But now that I was a Christian, I wanted to take it seriously. Reading the Bible as a Christian, Jesus came alive to me through the illumination of the Holy Spirit. The fundamentalist-charismatic groups I was associated with were big on “taking the Bible literally”. Not to believe in a literal six-day creation meant you didn’t really believe in a literal three-day resurrection, or you were on the slippery slope at any rate.
Now I was conflicted. Jesus was alive to me, and I wasn’t about to return to the weak and beggarly elements of atheism. But I couldn’t un-know what I had learned as a geologist. About that time a second edition of The Genesis Flood by Whitcomb and Morris was released and I got a copy. At first I wanted to embrace “flood geology” and “creation science” as a way to resolve the conflict. But as time went on the untenable nature of such “science” became manifest and to continue with it would not be just cognitive dissonance but outright dishonesty, at least to me personally.
So my “science and the Bible” conflict started the opposite of most people’s experience. Usually they have a faith tradition and then coming into contact with science challenges that tradition. For me, I had the science first, then the faith tradition challenged the science. It’s an important point to remember about me, because when later confronted by the traditionalists that I was a “compromiser” who just wanted the approval of “the worldly scientists”; I knew the accusation to be false. I just wanted the truth. I knew the Bible was true because it truly revealed Jesus to me. I knew the foundations of modern geology to be true because they rested upon well verified empirical facts.
, a book of Henri Nouwen’s teachings on the spiritual life, we read this different perspective:
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, 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 
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One of the better essays on Paul that I’ve read in recent years was written by Timothy Gombis in a new book about how the New Perspective affects our understanding of the life in Christ: 
, and the wonderful 
, by John M. G. Barclay. That right there is more than I read on Paul in seminary, and I took specific courses on Pauline theology!
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