Why I am an Ally – Ministry That Helps


I have been blessed with a significant number of friends who are, or have been, Pastors and leaders within their churches. These are men and women that I respect and hold in high regard. Most of them are Canadian, and most of them are what I would term “moderate evangelicals”. My moderate I would mean that for the most part they are theologically conservative, not overly political, and have a Pastor’s heart to care for people.

A few weeks back, a reader commenting on Internet Monk asked a question along the lines of:

For those of us in churches that are fairly conservative theologically and who consider homosexual behavior to be sinful, what are you asking us to do?

So I asked my friends.

The responses that I got back have quite frankly been overwhelming. Overwhelming in the amount of material I received in response, and overwhelming in the sense that I wanted to be faithful to my friends who have answered me in good faith, and faithful to our reader who asked the questions, and not sure how to accomplish both.

I am not sure how to adequately convey the Pastor’s heart that was expressed in page after page of response. Many of them expressed that they were active in ministry to LGBTQ congregants within their own churches. As they were theologically conservative, they called for celibacy in their members who were same sex attracted. But they tried to do so in a way that was coming alongside that individual as a helper rather than a judge. Most of the pastors said that some one who was same sex attracted and trying to be celibate would not be restricted in ministry in any more than any other person in the church with similar gifts and desire to follow Christ.

Two of the Pastors pointed me to the same resource, and I upon reading it again I was reminded  that another person had previously also pointed this out to me. It is written by a same-sex attracted celibate Christian. The article was originally posted on SpiritualFriendship.org and is reprinted with permission of that site.

I include it in its whole here because I think it does a wonderful job of answering the original question. “What are you asking us to do?”

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Ministry That Helps

By Wesley Hill

Recently I gave a talk to a group of folks who work for a campus ministry. They had asked me to come and speak on the theme of ministering to LGBT students at colleges and universities. I get a lot of requests like this, and, truth be told, in the days leading up to the event, I was thinking I would simply dust off a talk I’d given a dozen times before. But the more I thought about it, the more I kept combing back through my memories of being a—deeply closeted—college student and of the kind of ministry that meant the most to me. After a few days pondering these memories, I took out a pad of paper and started to write a list. I wrote down the characteristics of the people and the gestures and the conversations that helped me find grace and hope when I most needed it. I came up with a list of ten points, and I’d like to share them here… And I’d love it if folks added to this list in the comment section.

The ministry that has helped me most has been:

  1. ministry that doesn’t underestimate the power of small gestures.

I recall listening to a sermon by John Piper on the word “everyone” in Romans 1:16 (“I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes”). And this is what he said:

O, what an exhilarating word to those of us in this room who feel that there is something about us that rules us out! Wrong family, wrong background, wrong education, wrong language, wrong race, wrong culture, wrong sexual preference, wrong moral track record. Then to hear the word, “Everyone who believes.” Everyone! One thing can rule you out: unbelief. Not trusting Jesus. But nothing else has to. The good news that Christ died for our sins, and that he rose from the dead to open eternal life, and that salvation is by grace through faith – all that is for everyone who believes. Not just Jews and not just Gentiles and no one race or social class or culture, but everyone who believes.

The only reference Piper made to sexuality in that sermon was that reference to “sexual preference”—to those in his congregation who might be ashamed of their same-sex attraction and who worried that it somehow disqualified them from living a Christian life. It was such a tiny, fleeting reference, but what it said to me was that this pastor was aware of gay folks in his congregation. They were on his mind and heart. They were visible to him, and he wanted them to hear the gospel as a word specifically for them. A small, almost minuscule gesture in the big scheme of things, but it landed powerfully on me at the time.

My friend Brent Bailey has described “safe people”—people with whom gay and lesbian Christians can be honest without fear of judgment or disgust—as people who aren’t afraid to raise the issue:

Without a doubt, someone’s willingness to broach LGBT issues in any sort of positive or empathetic tone is the clearest and most visible indicator they might be prepared to listen to me talk about my sexuality. They may do something as noticeable as leading a Bible study about homosexuality or as simple as posting a link on Facebook to a story about sexual minorities; but in environments where nontraditional sexuality receives no attention, even the tiniest statement of knowledge or interest can communicate a loud-and-clear message (accurate or not) that this person is the safest person in the room.

Amen.

  1. ministry that avoids assumptions about the causes of same-sex attraction and my personal history.

I recall a particularly difficult time in my life when I was trying to make an initial appointment with a Christian counselor to talk about my homosexuality. As we were emailing and comparing calendars, he asked me to describe briefly what I hoped to discuss with him. When I said that I was gay and was experiencing a great deal of confusion in a particular friendship, he immediately wrote back and asked if I could bring my father along with me to our sessions since, he said, he had never met a gay man whose sexuality wasn’t, at root, about a deficit of masculine, fatherly affirmation. I was dismayed. This counselor had never met me, had not heard me try to articulate what was drawing me to seek counseling, and already he was offering a diagnosis. I felt hemmed in, confined, as if the multi-shaded threads of my story were being bleached to a monochrome. No matter that I felt my relationship with my father was a far cry from this typical “father wound” story the counselor presumed.

Melinda Selmys has written very powerfully about how hurtful it can be when straight Christians offer a one-size-fits-all narrative of the origins of same-sex desire:

Where the animosity [from LGBT people] comes in, is when people try to aggressively project such narratives onto others. It’s one thing to say “My mother really was smothering, my father really was absent, and that really did leave me in a headspace where I feel driven to have sex with men in order to reconnect with my damaged masculinity,” it’s another thing to say, “That guy over there is just saying that he had a perfectly normal childhood because he’s unwilling to confront the pain of the deep wounds which his parents left on his psyche.” That guy over there has an absolute and inalienable right, for as long as he is alive, to wrestle with his own experience in his own way, to seek the Truth of it within himself, and to construct whatever narratives he requires to provide for his own spiritual and psychological needs.

Ministry that’s helped me most has been ministry that begins with the assumption that my story is unique, that my gayness isn’t the same as anyone else’s, and that that uniqueness is worthy of attention and respect and dignity.

  1. ministry that recognizes that my sexual orientation affects everything about me, just like heterosexuality does for others.

I won’t belabor this point since I’ve written at length about it elsewhere. Suffice it to say, in the words of my friend Misty Irons, the ministry that has been most consoling and helpful in my life is ministry that recognizes that “the experience [of being gay or lesbian] is nearly parallel to finding oneself heterosexual.” If you want to know what it feels like to awaken, during or even before puberty, to being gay and to understand what it feels like to long for intimacy and companionship as a gay person, your best bet is to reflect deeply on what it feels like for you to be heterosexual. Just as your (straight) sexuality suffuses much more than your overt romantic encounters, attractions, or relationships, the same is true for a gay or lesbian person: our sexuality is more like a facet of our personalities than a separable piece of our behavior; it’s more like a trait than a habit, more like a sensibility than an action.

I still remember reading this older post by Eve Tushnet for the first time and immediately emailing it to a dozen friends. “This,” I said, “is what it feels like to be gay and Christian.”

My lesbianism is part of why I form the friendships I form. It’s part of why I volunteer at a pregnancy center. Not because I’m attracted to the women I counsel, but because my connection to other women does have an adoring and erotic component, and I wanted to find a way to express that connection through works of mercy. My lesbianism is part of why I love the authors I love. It’s inextricable from who I am and how I live in the world. Therefore I can’t help but think it’s inextricable from my vocation.

Experiencing same-sex sexual desire isn’t just about who you want to go to bed with; it shapes your entire way of being in the world.

  1. ministry that recognizes that my sexual orientation doesn’t define me.

Many traditionalist Christians have written in recent years on what it means for Christian ethics and pastoral care that sexual orientation as we know it is culturally constructed. In other words, same-sex attracted people throughout history have not always understood themselves as having fixed sexual “orientations” and cultural “identities,” nor will they go on doing so forever. Those things—those understandings of what “being gay” amounts to—are a particular reality of our cultural moment, and same-sex attracted people like me are having to figure out how to navigate it.

But how does that help, in terms of ministry to gay and lesbian people? Well, for starters, realizing that my gayness isn’t some fixed script that I must conform to has given me freedom to explore historic Christian, chaste ways to express my love for men. What my culture defines as “gay”—the story my world offers me for who I’m supposed to be and how I’m supposed to live—isn’t something I have to embrace, and there’s freedom in choosing to try to express my love for men through friendship and service rather than through marriage or romantic partnership. Granted, opting out of the dominant way of understanding “gay” can often feel more like martyrdom than freedom. But if traditional Christianity is true, then self-denial—taking up one’s cross and following Jesus—is, in fact, regardless of how it feels, real freedom.

  1. ministry that takes the risk of speaking up about the topic.

One of the most dangerous things you can do right now, ministry-wise, it seems, is broach the topic of homosexuality in a church or campus ministry. You’re almost guaranteed to offend dozens of people, on every “side” and end of the spectrum, and probably even cause a firestorm. But consider the alternative: what if you stay silent? What if you never preach a sermon on this, or lead a Bible study on it, or ever mention it in your prayer group? Andrew Sullivan has written about the deadly consequences of silence:

In my adolescence and young adulthood, the teaching of the Church was merely a silence, an increasingly hollow denial even of the existence of homosexuals, let alone a credible ethical guide as to how they should live their lives. It is still true that in over thirty years of weekly churchgoing, I have never heard a homily that attempted to explain how a gay man should live, or how his sexuality should be expressed. I have heard nothing but a vast and endless and embarrassed silence, an awkward, unexpressed desire for the simple nonexistence of such people, for their absence from the moral and physical universe, for a word or a phrase, like “objective disorder,” that could simply abolish the problem they represented and the diverse humanity they symbolized.

The ministry that has helped me most has been ministry that has ventured to say something about how I might live my life, how I might go about giving and receiving love. The times when a Christian friend or priest has offered me some concrete, hopeful possibility of how I might shape my life—those have been lifelines for me. But they’ve required my friends to take the risk of speaking up and of committing themselves to learning along with me.

  1. ministry that shows a passion to engage Scripture and Christian theology in a deep, rigorous way.

Talk to virtually any gay or lesbian believer, and I predict that within five minutes you’ll be hearing a tale about long, anguished wrestling with Scripture, with church tradition, with books of exegesis and psychology. Unlike some of our straight peers, we same-sex attracted folks don’t have the luxury of remaining neutral on “the issue.” We’ve had to make concrete choices about how to “glorify God in our bodies” (1 Corinthians 6:20). And many of us have therefore learned to crave serious, deep, searching engagement with Scripture and Christian theology. We’re impatient with hasty arguments and shallow Scriptural reasoning. We’re frustrated when our fellow Christians want to slap a quick answer on our questions. We want to know if the church’s historic opposition to gay sex is just about cultural prejudice or whether it really is rooted in the Bible’s basic view of human nature and redemption.

A while ago Rod Dreher published a letter from a millennial who left the church because of her church’s refusal or inability to offer a serious theological case for its ethical stance:

In all the years I was a member, my evangelical church made exactly one argument about SSM [same-sex marriage]. It’s the argument I like to call the Argument from Ickiness: Being gay is icky, and the people who are gay are the worst kind of sinner you can be. Period, done, amen, pass the casserole. When you have membership with no theological or doctrinal depth that you have neglected to equip with the tools to wrestle with hard issues, the moment ickiness no longer rings true with young believers, their faith is destroyed. This is why other young ex-evangelicals I know point as their “turning point” on gay marriage to the moment they first really got to know someone who was gay. If your belief on SSM is based on a learned disgust at the thought of a gay person, the moment a gay person, any gay person, ceases to disgust you, you have nothing left. In short, the anti-SSM side, and really the Christian side of the culture war in general, is responsible for its own collapse. It failed to train up the young people on its own side preferring instead to harness their energy while providing them no doctrinal depth by keeping them in a bubble of emotion dependent on their never engaging with the outside world on anything but warlike terms. Perhaps someday my fellow ex-evangelical Millennials and I will join other churches, but it will be as essentially new Christians with no religious heritage from our childhoods to fall back on.

The upshot? Theology matters. Serious, sustained reading of Scripture is vital to those of us who are trying to figure out what to do with our baptized bodies. We need ministry that recognizes that.

  1. ministry that tries to imagine the difficulty of being gay (regardless of one’s “position” on the issue) and the costliness of staying single.

The ministry that has meant the most to me is ministry that doesn’t try to whitewash or downplay the sheer difficulty of the discipleship I believe I’m called to. Sometimes straight Christians have tried to comfort me in my loneliness by reminding me that marriage is no cakewalk either—and, in many cases, marriage can exacerbate loneliness. “I’m in a very good and happy marriage,” a friend once said to me, “and I still battle loneliness.” I appreciate that perspective very much, and I need it, since I have an inveterate romantic streak that I’m always trying to temper. But, frankly, the more lasting consolations have come from people, like my friend David Mills, who are willing to say things like this:

We ask our homosexual brethren, and our divorced brethren without annulments, to deny themselves something almost everyone else can have: a marriage, two people forming a haven in a heartless world, with someone they actively desire, with all the pleasures of romance that sexual desire brings. We ask them to live as celibates in a sexually-sodden culture where they may never find the alternative of deep, committed friendships. We ask them to risk loneliness we don’t risk.

Naming and honestly facing the depths of the risks and the burdens I’m asked to shoulder is a hallmark of the ministry that’s meant the most to me. The way I’m trying to live often seems very hard, and I appreciate it when my fellow Christians acknowledge that.

  1. ministry that seeks to imagine and implement creative avenues to spiritual kinship and friendship.

The kind of ministry that has most consistently given me hope is ministry that doesn’t end with bemoaning the difficulty of celibacy, though, nor with a negative. It’s been ministry that majors on the positive: what kind of life, what kind of future, what kind of relationships am I being called towards? We’ve beaten this drum a lot here at SF, and no one has said it better than Eve Tushnet. “[I]nitially,” she’s written, “I conceived of my task, as a lgbt/ssa Catholic, as basically a) negative (don’t have gay sex) and b) intellectual (figure out why Church teaching is the way it is). I now think of it much more as the positive task of discerning vocation: discerning how God is calling me to pour out love to others.”

Part and parcel of this kind of ministry is a refusal to look down on celibacy as “second best.” Too often the possibility of chaste, committed friendship has gone unexplored because of our determination to get as far away as possible from singleness. If we’re on the left side of the spectrum, we want same-sex marriage rather than celibacy, and if we’re on the right, we’re often interested in ex-gay approaches that hold out the promise of opposite-sex coupling rather than celibacy. But ministry that has been the most helpful to me over the years is ministry that, without dishonoring marriage in the least, has encouraged me to imagine a single life overflowing with familial ties and hospitality and “thick” kinship commitments.

  1. ministry that seeks to recognize and nurture the gifts of gay and lesbian believers.

One of the dangers of the whole notion of “ministry to LGBT Christians” is that it neglects to talk much about the “ministry of LGBT Christians.” The kind of ministry that has been most important in my life has been ministry that doesn’t simply look on me as pitiable or “broken” or the perpetually needier, more fragile party in the relationship. Rather, it’s been ministry that sees me as a complex, in-the-process-of-being-redeemed person—a “glorious ruin” (in Francis Schaeffer’s fine phrase)—whose experiences of temptation, repentance, grace, and growth have equipped me with unique perspectives and have forged a certain sensitivity in me that can be drawn out for the good of the church.

Honestly, my gay and lesbian Christian friends are some of the deepest, most thoughtful, most compassionate believers I know, and the ministry I’ve received from them has been some of the most caring I’ve experienced. As Misty Irons has written,

So many times when I encounter a song, a performance, or a piece of art [or, I would add, an act of service or kindness in the church] that strikes me as so true and subtle and poignant and uplifting I feel almost a spiritual connection with it, I later learn the artist behind it is gay. It’s happened so often I now take it for granted. Maybe there’s something about being gay that enables an artist to see more clearly what it means to be human, to identify certain truths about us all. Maybe it is the ones who are forced to the margins who truly understand what it is we all have in common.

Maybe, as C. S. Lewis has said, there are “certain kinds of sympathy and understanding [and] a certain social role” that only gay people can play in the church. Maybe we are “called to otherness,” and the church’s ministry to us is in large measure about cultivating the ministry we can offer to the church.

  1. ministry that revolves around the basics of the gospel and the “normal means of grace.”

I often tell people that the best “gay ministry” I have benefitted from has been ministry that only rarely mentions anything “gay” at all. It hasn’t been a gay small group or support ministry or gay-themed Bible study or anything like that (as good as all those things may be for some people!). Rather, the ministry that has proved most stabilizing and encouraging has been garden-variety gospel preaching that has held the Cross and Resurrection constantly before me.

When I was in the throes of the coming out process and struggling with more loneliness than I felt before or since, I belonged to a church that emphasized, over and over again, how suffering and tears and struggle were normal parts of the Christian experience. As the New Testament scholar Richard Hays has written, commenting on Romans 8:23 (“not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies”), “Anyone who does not recognize this as a description of authentic Christian existence has never struggled seriously with the imperatives of the gospel, which challenge and frustrate our ‘natural’ impulses in countless ways.” More than anything else, it was that kind of ministry that provided the framework, the plausibility structure, if you like, that made my own frustration and struggles seem bearable and maybe even beautiful.

As I’ve gone on in this “gay Christian” life, I’ve come to see that the kind of ministry I most crave, the kind that most helps, is the regular, bog-standard ministry of Word and Sacrament. Sitting under preaching that points me to Jesus and receiving Communion (which is “Jesus placing himself in our hands so we know exactly where to find him,” as one of my Lutheran colleagues has put it)—that’s the kind of ministry I need. Kneeling at the altar rail is where I receive the strength I need to keep going on this journey.

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I am afraid that I still haven’t been able to coalesce the material that my pastoral friends wrote. Next week I will be using a fair bit of it as I look at how traditional churches respond to same sex couples. I do think that this article at least partially answers the original question that was asked. I will finally (phew) conclude the following week with my own thoughts on the matter. As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome. I repeat Wesley’s request: “I’d love it if folks added to this list in the comment section.”

Mere Science and Christian Faith, by Greg Cootsona: Chapter 5- Adam, Eve, and History

Mere Science and Christian Faith: Bridging the Divide with Emerging Adults, by Greg Cootsona: Chapter 5- Adam, Eve, and History

We are reviewing the book, Mere Science and Christian Faith, by Greg Cootsona, subtitled Bridging the Divide with Emerging Adults.  Today we look at Chapter 5- Adam, Eve, and History.  Cootsona starts the chapter citing a Pew poll from 2012 that found 64% of white evangelicals and 50% of black evangelicals do not believe humans evolved.  The historicity of Adam and Eve remains one of the most contentious points between mainstream science and evangelical Christians.  The same poll found 78% of mainline Protestants are in support of human evolution.

Cootsona outlines the 3 basic positions on human evolution that Christians could take.  One being the basic YEC position that Adam and Eve were the first humans on earth, specially created, and all humans descended from them.  The Garden story and the Fall are to be taken literally as recounted; any literary position is contradicted by the apostle Paul in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15.  Position 3 is the position outlined by C.S. Lewis; a literal Adam and Eve never existed; instead they are paradigmatic of the human condition.  Lewis in The Problem of Pain wrote, “For long centuries, God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of himself.”  In this view we are not descended from a single pair of humans, but from gradual evolutionary development and share a common descent with the great apes.  This is the position that accords with mainstream science (and YECs would argue simply capitulates to modern science).  The second position holds that Adam and Eve are, in some ways historical figures, but generally sets out a time period for common descent with other primates and then designates a point when God decided to set Adam and Eve apart as the first and original image-bearing Homo sapiens.  This is the view of John Walton, S. Joshua Swamidass, C. John Collins, and Tim Keller.

The real problem is the interpretation of Paul in Romans 5:12-21 and 1Corinthians 15:21-22, 45-49.  The Genesis text itself displays evidence it is not to be read in some modernistic, CNN-news report, type of historical narrative.  A talking snake who loses its legs, magic fruit that make you wise when you bite it, another magical fruit that makes you live forever.  Angels with flaming swords—so where is Eden, the Bible doesn’t say Noah’s flood destroyed it, we should at least be able to walk up to the flaming-sword-wielding guards.  A man named “The Man”, a women named “Mother of All Living”, another man named “Spear” who kills his brother named “Fleeting Breath”.  Then he worries about other people killing him—what other people?  And he takes a wife- who would that be?  Don’t say his sisters, Genesis 4 is pretty clear that after Cain killed Abel there were no sisters born yet.  If these features don’t make you at least wonder what kind of literature this is—then nothing will.

Paul, on the other hand seems quite succinct in 1Corinthians 15:21-22:

For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.

It seems obvious that Paul thought Adam was a historical person.  Scot McKnight in the book Adam and the Genome, which I reviewed here, probably gave the best attempt at re-interpreting Paul that I’ve ever read.  Cootsona tries his best to flesh out nuances in these positions with respect to emerging adults.  Position 1 simply does not accord with mainstream science, and the risk of holding to that position is to present to the emerging generations the “all or nothing” approach; if you “give in” to evolution you can’t be a Christian.  It’s become apparent that many emerging adults, when presented with this stark dichotomy, are choosing not to identify as Christians.  Cootsona’s solution is to “keep our eyes on Jesus” as the historical figure, because He is our center, the author and finisher of our faith.  He notes that Adam does not make extensive appearances in the Bible nor the creeds.

Cootsona notes bestselling author and theologian Greg Boyd read Lewis’ views as an undergraduate while he was struggling with YEC, which he believed to be the Christian consensus.  He though YEC made little sense scientifically, and Lewis’ insights into Adam and the fall helped him keep the Christian faith viable.  Ultimately, Boyd was inclined to believe in a historical Adam, vis-a-vis position 2, but the experience of reading Lewis and the purely typological view led him to this conclusion:

I, as a pastor of an evangelical and Anabaptist church, think it vitally important that we not put forth the historicity of Adam as a matter that is essential to Christian faith.  Regarding those who can’t see a harmony between the statements “I believe in Christ” and “I don’t believe Adam was historical” he says, “I implore them to refrain from becoming dogmatic on this point and simply to trust the genuineness of those who disagree.  The fact is, dogmatism on this point would have tragically barred C.S. Lewis, myself, and a multitude of others from the life-giving kingdom.  This debate, he concludes, should be construed as a debate among orthodox Christians, not as a debate that determines whether or not one is an orthodox Christian.

Cootsona begs people to remember that emerging adults are sick of the conflict between Christians and scientists.  For the demographic that is the focus of this book, positions 2 and 3 both take mainstream science and mere Christianity seriously.  Let’s agree to disagree without excommunicating each other.

Here is how I try to phrase the issue to evangelical Christians in my circles.  Science hasn’t proven human evolution is true, and it never will.  But that is because science doesn’t ever prove anything that is inferred about past historicity, it simply gives provisional preference to the current most probable explanation.   In other words, we have, so far, failed to reject the hypothesis (no. 1) that humans share a common ancestral population with apes.  The hypothesis (no. 2) that humans appeared instantaneously at one point in the recent past and have no shared genealogy or genomic history with the great apes has failed.

Evidential example number 1- the fossil record.  If hypothesis #2 is correct, there should be no evidence of creatures in the fossil record that exhibit phenotypic characteristics shared between apes and humans.  In fact, we see an incomplete but noticeable continuum with older fossils more apelike than human and newer fossils more human-like than ape.   “Probable hominins” like Ardipithecus ramidus, a species that lived in Africa about 4 million years ago (mya) had skeletal characteristics intermediate between upright walking and the climbing of trees, and a small cranial capacity of 300-350 cubic centimeters (cc) (modern humans are about 1,300-1,400 cubic centimeters).  Australopithecus afarensis (aka Lucy) about 3-4 million years ago shows further shifts toward walking and a cranial capacity of 400-550 cc.  Later still we see pre-modern Homo erectus (“Upright Man”) dating to about 1.8 mya with full bi-pedalism and a cranial capacity of 700 cc.   We have failed to reject the hypothesis (no. 1) that humans share a common ancestral population with apes.

Hypothesis number 2 fails to account for the physical reality of the fossil record.

Evidential example number 2- Endogenous Retroviruses.  Endogenous Retroviruses (ERVs) are lingering remnants of failed viral infection, which occurred in an ancestor’s sex cell and got propagated in its offspring. The viral insertion site is completely random and finding one in the same location in two individuals indicates they each had that same ancestor. There are at least sixteen different known instances of common retrogene insertions between chimps and humans. The Odds of 16 in the exact same place are not possible except as explained by hereditary mechanisms.  Hypothesis number 2 fails to account for the physical reality of Endogenous Retroviruses, however, we have failed to reject the hypothesis (no. 1) that humans share a common ancestral population with apes.

Evidential example number 3- Ubiquitous genes.  The gist of the argument:

  1. Ubiquitous genes: There are certain genes that all living organisms have because they perform very basic life functions; these genes are called ubiquitous (universal) genes.
  2. Ubiquitous genes are uncorrelated with species-specific phenotypes: Ubiquitous genes have no relationship with the specific functions of different species. For example, it doesn’t matter whether you are a bacterium, a human, a frog, a whale, a hummingbird, a slug, a fungus, or a sea anemone – you have these ubiquitous genes, and they all perform the same basic biological function no matter what you are.
  3. Molecular sequences of ubiquitous genes are functionally redundant: Any given ubiquitous protein has an extremely large number of different functionally equivalent forms (i.e. protein sequences which can perform the same biochemical function).
  4. Specific ubiquitous genes are unnecessary in any given species: Obviously, there is no a priori reason why every organism should have the same sequence or even similar sequences. No specific sequence is functionally necessary in any organism – all that is necessary is one of the large number of functionally equivalent forms of a given ubiquitous gene or protein.
  5. Heredity correlates sequences, even in the absence of functional necessity: There is one, and only one, observed mechanism which causes two different organisms to have ubiquitous proteins with similar sequences (aside from the extreme improbability of pure chance, of course). That mechanism is heredity.

CONCLUSION: Thus, similar ubiquitous genes indicate genealogical relationship: It follows that organisms which have similar sequences for ubiquitous proteins are genealogically related. Roughly, the more similar the sequences, the closer the genealogical relationship.  An example:

Cytochrome c is an essential and ubiquitous protein found in all organisms, including bacteria.  It is a necessary part of a universal common metabolic process all cells with mitochondria need to synthesize energy used by the cell. The oxygen we breathe is used to generate energy in this process.

Cytochrome c is absolutely essential for life – organisms that lack it cannot live. It has been shown that the human cytochrome c protein works in yeast (a unicellular organism) that has had its own native cytochrome c gene deleted, and human cytochrome c inserted, even though yeast cytochrome c differs from human cytochrome c over 40% of the protein.  Using a ubiquitous gene such as cytochrome c, there is no reason to assume that two different organisms should have the same protein sequence or even similar protein sequences, unless the two organisms are genealogically related.

From the theory of common descent and the standard phylogenetic tree we surmise that humans and chimpanzees are quite closely related. It is therefore predicted, in spite of the odds, that human and chimpanzee cytochrome c sequences should be much more similar than, say, human and yeast cytochrome c — simply due to inheritance.  This has been confirmed: Humans and chimpanzees have the exact same cytochrome c protein sequence. In the absence of common descent, the chance of this occurrence is conservatively less than 10-93 (1 out of 1093).  The number 1093 is about one billion times larger than the number of atoms in the visible universe.  Furthermore, human and chimpanzee cytochrome c proteins differ by about 10 amino acids from all other mammals. The chance of this occurring in the absence of a hereditary mechanism is less than 10-29.  Once again, we have failed to reject the hypothesis (no. 1) that humans share a common ancestral population with apes.

So why the big science lecture?  The point I’m trying to make is that the explanation of common descent is the provisionally accepted most probable explanation we currently have.  Could God have instantly created humans with the same ubiquitous genes in the same sequence as the great apes?  Could God have permitted viral infections that took the exact same positions in apes that they took in humans?  The answer is that, sure, he could have, God can do anything.  But why?  Why did he create creatures, now long extinct, that LOOK like they are transitionally developed between apes and humans?  Why did he create gene sequences that LOOK exactly like they were inherited?  My grandson had a paternity test conducted, as ordered by the court, when my great-grandson was born.  The probability that my grandson is the father is 99.99%.  The idea he isn’t the father is not seriously considered by anyone, not even by the most rabid creationist.  The probability that we inherited the same cytochrome c sequence from the great apes is: 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999%.  There is no serious consideration that we aren’t related.

So why did Paul write what he wrote in Romans 5 and 1Corinthians 15?  Well, I don’t know.  Cootsona quotes Tim Keller:

[Paul] most definitely want to teach us that Adam and Eve were real historical figures,  When you refuse to take a biblical author literally when he clearly wants you to do so, you have moved away from the traditional understanding of biblical authority… If Adam doesn’t exist, Paul’s whole argument—that both sin and grace work “covenantally”—falls apart.  You can’t say that “Paul was a man of his time” but we can accept his basic teaching about Adam.  If you don’t believe what he believes about Adam, you are denying the core of Paul’s teaching.

Keller, who is not YEC, makes a very good point, and probably speaks for most conservative evangelicals. Now consider this quote from Scot McKnight from his book with Dennis Venema, Adam and the Genome:

“If we are to read the Bible in context, to let the Bible be prima scriptura, and to do so with our eyes on students of science, we will need to give far more attention than we have in the past to the various sorts of Adams and Eves the Jewish world knew.  One sort that Paul didn’t know because it had not yet been created was what is known today as the historical Adam and Eve.  Literary Adam and Eve, he knew; genealogical Adam and Eve, he knew; moral, exemplary, archetypal Adam and Eve, he knew.  But the historical Adam and Eve came into the world well after Paul himself had gone to his eternal reward, where he would have come to know them as they really are.”

As I said in my review of Scot and Dennis’ book, there is no way the ancient authors of scripture, including Paul or even Jesus, could have imagined the implications of current genomics.  To them, if you wanted a sheep you bred a male sheep to a female sheep, if you wanted a cow, you bred a male cow to a female cow, if you wanted a man, then a man and a woman had to get together.  So at some point, logically, there had to be a first pair of sheep, a first pair of cows, and a first man and woman.  What other explanation could there be?  There is no way they could have imagined a population emerging, hell, I have trouble imagining a population emerging.  If our species emerges from a primate lineage, when and where did the first morally culpable human arise?  Are there lineages of humans that were/are not morally culpable?  What is sin, how is it revealed to us, and what are its origins?

The only way we are going to get satisfying answers to the question of origins and who we are as living beings is for scientists like Dennis Venema to keep pushing the frontiers of science forward and theologians like Scot McKnight to think through the implications.  There is no going back, and the young adults, who are listening to our conversation, are certainly not going back.

Another Look: Shirley

Alone. Photo by Chris Blakely

One of our team members said that Shirley “died of loneliness.”

She had family, and whenever I met them they seemed to be attentive to her. I never heard her speak a word against them. But none of them were able to care for her in her final season of life.

When Shirley first came to hospice, she lived in her own apartment. A relative stayed with her, but – and I don’t remember all the details – she was either not capable or reliable enough to take care of a terminally ill patient. I recall that on my first visit this relative expressed her opinion that Shirley was not really as sick as they said she was and that she was going to be all right. She didn’t think she needed the medications we recommended. She didn’t want us there.

Shirley asked me for a Bible on that first encounter, and I got her one. She welcomed prayer. She was fairly quiet, overshadowed by her opinionated relative, but I liked her right away and told her I would look forward to seeing her again.

It wasn’t long before everyone realized the caregiving situation in the apartment wasn’t going to work. Even though Shirley had other family members in town, some of them very capable, their other responsibilities prevented them from providing the continuous level of care she needed. She also had family in California, including a little grandchild she adored, but circumstances kept them far, far apart geographically.

Shirley went into the hospital while plans were developed, and she ended up agreeing to go a wonderful facility in town that takes indigent hospice patients. And there she thrived.

She enjoyed the communal dining table where she could sit with the other residents and visit. The staff grew to love her and did a stellar job caring for her. The relatives she had in town also visited. One of our team members developed a strong bond with her and went often to see her. Shirley talked to her California family on the phone regularly and kept up with her grandchild’s growth and activities through pictures.

But Shirley only and always wanted one thing: to go home. She told that to our team members on almost every visit. And the longer she remained a hospice patient, the more she felt that way. Her disease progressed slowly through many ups and downs. Over time, more and more pictures of her little grandchild out west went up on her wall.

She slept a lot and there were long stretches, months at a time, when I would visit and never get a chance to really talk with her. She gained a lot of weight from the good food, lack of activity, the nature of her disease, and loneliness. I think it was easier for her to sleep.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, there came a time when Shirley perked up and became more herself. On one of my last visits, she was sitting on the side of her bed and a big smile came across her face. “I told the nurse I was hoping you’d come by!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been wanting to see my enthusiastic chaplain!”

She was as animated, conversant, and full of smiles as I’d ever seen her that day. I showed her pictures of my grandkids while she talked about her little one so far away. He would be coming to visit in a few weeks, and she couldn’t wait. She talked to him almost every day on the phone in anticipation.

That was on a Monday. By Thursday, to everyone’s surprise, she had slipped into a coma and was actively dying. I sat at her bedside and said prayers until a couple of family members arrived. I excused myself so they could have time with her. I went out to the foyer and sat at a table to do my paperwork. In a few minutes, I saw them walk out the door.

On Friday night Shirley died. Her family decided not to come to the facility. When I came back to work on Monday, I learned of her death and for the next several days I searched the obituaries, contacted funeral homes, and tried to call her family to find out the arrangements. All to no avail. At the end of the week, I finally got hold of the relative who had lived with her in her apartment, back when we first met. There would be no service, she said.

Today, I had to write this down.

Someone should remember.

Someone should say it: “Shirley’s gone home.”

• • •

Photo by Chris Blakely at Flickr. Creative Commons License

Genesis: Where It All Begins (3)

The Good Land (2017)

Genesis: Where It All Begins (3)
God’s Good Creation

Many students of the Bible think that Genesis 1, with its intricate structure, repetition, and the heightened character of its language, may represent an ancient liturgy confessing faith in the Creator God. If it is, then the refrain, repeated seven times, is captured in these verses:

  • And God saw that the light was good. (Gen 1:4)
  • And God saw that it was good. (Gen 1:10)
  • And God saw that it was good. (Gen 1:12)
  • And God saw that it was good. (Gen 1:18)
  • And God saw that it was good. (Gen 1:21)
  • And God saw that it was good. (Gen 1:25)
  • God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. (Gen 1:31)

You simply cannot come away from reading and meditating on this text without concluding that this world and all that God made is a good creation. Here are a couple of thoughts focusing in on what that means in the context of Genesis 1.

One, the word “good” involves a word-play. It contrasts with the phrase in Gen 1:3, “The earth was formless and void.” In Hebrew, “formless and void” translates tohu wabohu, which is used elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible to refer to a wilderness that is unsuitable for human habitation. “Good” is the Hebrew word tov, and represents the opposite of that. God took that which was tohu and made it tov.

Two, “good” indicates that which is beneficial for life to flourish. The word-play mentioned above contrasts that which is uninhabitable with that which can bring forth life and sustain the life of its creatures. It is not simply that God is evaluating his work and commenting on its quality. Rather, he is evaluating it according to its fertility and ability to provide abundantly for the life of the world. The Jews would have understood this contrast very well, having been brought through the wilderness (tohu wabohu) to the Promised Land (tov).

Three, the text indicates that this “good” creation is God’s provision. The word “saw” in the refrain “God saw that it was good” is not just saying that God looked at the world he brought to order as if to observe it. The word “saw” is a Hebrew verb that can have the idea of “God saw to it that it was good.” In the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, the patriarch named the place “The Lord will provide” (Yahweh yireh). That is the same word. “The Lord will see (to it).” So, in Genesis 1, when it affirms that God saw that it was good, it is saying that God provided what is good for his creation, that which promotes the flourishing of life and blessing.

Now, I want to make an assertion that I fully realize goes against the grain of a long tradition of Christian theology, at least the way it has been understood on a popular level.

God has never retracted his statement that “it is good.”

Most evangelical presentations of the gospel begin like this: In the beginning, God created a world that was good (meaning perfect, unsullied by any sin or evil, a paradise). But…

Then they go on to assert that Adam and Eve’s sin introduced human sin and death into the world, and the very nature of the world itself was changed. The world itself became “not good.” It was at that point that animals as well as humans began to die. It was at that point that all the things we consider “bad” became part of the very nature of the world.

The corollary to this in a lot of popular theology is that God’s goal therefore is to abandon this creation and put a new one in its place, rather than renewing and transforming the present one.

If you want to see a complete statement of the goodness of God’s creation, in all its facets, see Psalm 104, and go back and re-read my earlier post, “Creation Is a Many-Splendored Thing: Delighting in God’s Goodness.” As I write in the post:

This reinforces [my] perspective…that creation did not change in its nature, properties, or “laws” as a result of a “fall” or “curse” in Genesis 3. It was deemed “very good” by God in the beginning, and in this poem, the psalmist affirms that it remains “very good.” This does not change the fact that God acts in both judgment and salvation in the world. But God does that because of what we read at the very end of Psalm 104 [which blames the wickedness of humans], not because creation itself has been placed under a curse that transformed it from “good” to “not good.”

Obviously, humans have introduced and continue to spread sin, evil, and corruption throughout this good world. In addition, we must face the fact of “surd evil”— evil or, from our point of view, “tragedy” or that which seems to work against life and well being that is incapable of rational explanation on our part.

However, my friends, this is our Father’s world. It remains good, God’s provision to us so that our lives and creation itself might flourish in well being and blessing.

The danger this good world faces continually is that human beings will corrupt it by “corrupting their way upon the earth” (Genesis 6:12). Humankind, given stewardship over the world, is called to represent the God of Genesis 1 and Psalm 104 in all the earth. This is the God who sustains creation by his wisdom and by the joy he takes in it. Likewise, through humanity’s wise care and use of this amazing planet, and by taking delight in its wonders and never forgetting from Whom they came, we take our rightful place here among the manifold splendors of the cosmos and helping to fulfill God’s will on earth as in heaven.

Monday with Michael Spencer: “I Miss You” (A Lament)

No Worse for Wear (2016)

Monday with Michael Spencer
“I Miss You” (A Lament)

How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?

• Psalm 13:1-2

• • •

I miss you, God.

It’s like you’re not around.

I see your world. I’m with your people. I’m surrounded by books about you. I read about you and talk about you. I teach others about you.

But I miss you.

I believe you’re there. I believe the Bible. I believe in Jesus. I don’t doubt your existence at all.

I miss you.

You. Not your people, or songs about you or books about you. I miss you.

I don’t miss all the theology in the books, the blogs and the lectures. I don’t miss the points of all the sermons. Or the answers to questions.

I have all those. Far more than I need, to be honest. But when David says, “Why are you hiding from me?” I know exactly what he is talking about.

I am missing you, God.

All of the activities that go on where you are talked about don’t bring you to me. Nothing that’s said or done in church fills this empty place.

When I pray, I feel like I’m talking, and that’s all. I don’t feel like I’m your child and you are there delighting in me. I feel you are far away.

It’s like you moved on and didn’t leave your address. It’s like we lived in the same house, but you’ve moved out without telling me where you went.

I cried out to you last night. Over and over. I want you to hear me. I don’t need to get your attention. I believe you’re close by. But I can’t see, sense or feel you. I feel alone. Like I am talking to myself.

I am starting to resent those who know you are close to them. Why am I different?

When I knew less, when I was considered young and ignorant, I felt you close to me. Then I grew up, and now I’m in the middle of life. It feels like I have lost you along the way. Somewhere in the crowd I let go of your hand, and now I’m alone. I’m calling out, but there is no answer.

There are people who will ridicule me for saying I want you. They will say I’m too interested in emotion. I don’t care what they say. This isn’t about my theology. My theology is as good as I can make it by all my efforts at study. No, this is about being able to stop and say “God is close to me. God delights in me. God is my friend, my father, my ever-present Abba.”

Where did you go? Why did you go away? Did my sins make you go away? Are you teaching me something? Are you taking away your presence so I will walk on, by faith, without you? Is this the “trough” C.S. Lewis wrote about? Will there ever be an explanation?

I’m weary of explanations and answers. I’m worn out with principles and illustrations. I’ve heard talking for what seems like an eternity and it doesn’t bring you closer to me.

When this happens, I hear voices telling me I shouldn’t need to feel you, and I shouldn’t even want to feel you. They will say I’m not reading and believing the verses. They will tell me I’m not trusting.

I may not be trusting you as I should. It’s harder and harder to trust you in this loneliness. It’s hard to turn away from this emptiness and tell myself you are real. I believe all of the right things in my mind, but my heart is aching to have you close to me again.

You’ve seen my tears. I don’t suppose they impress you. Maybe they are selfish, or sinful. I just don’t know anymore. Those tears are my way of saying I want you again. I want you in the way I experienced you before anyone said “Heâ’s smart” or “He knows about God.”

I miss you so much.

Please come back to me. Please tell me what to do. Please.

• • •

Previously unpublished

Sunday with Ron Rolheiser: Don’t Be Mystically Tone-Deaf

White Barn under Mystic Blue Skies (2016)

Sunday with Ron Rolheiser
Don’t Be Mystically Tone-Deaf

…Mysticism is as real as science.

But that’s not easy to understand or believe. We live in a world where what is real is reduced to what is physical, to what can be empirically measured, seen, touched, tasted, smelled. Today the physical is what’s real, massively, imperialistically. We live in a world that’s mystically tone-deaf, where all the goods are in the store window.

For this reason, faith is a struggle, but so are a lot of other things. When the surface is all that there is, it’s hard to be enchanted by anything, to see the depth that’s uncovered by poetry, aesthetics, altruism, religion, faith, and love. And it’s especially difficult to understand community.

When the physical is all that there is, it becomes virtually impossible to conceive of the body of Christ and it becomes difficult even just to understand our real connection with each other.

As human beings, we are connected to each other in ways beyond the physical, beyond time, beyond separation by distance, and even beyond separation by death. But to understand this we need, as Wendy Wright points out, a mystical imagination. And this is not so much the capacity to imagine the world of Harry Potter or Alice in Wonderland, or the even the archetypal world of Lord of the Rings.

The mystical imagination is the other half of the scientific imagination and, like science, its purpose is to help us see, imagine, understand, speak about, and relate to reality in a way beyond fantasy and superstition. But the mystical imagination can show us something that science, wonderful though it is, cannot, namely, it can show us the many grace-drenched and spirit-laden layers of reality that are not perceived by our physical senses. The mystical imagination can show us how the Holy Spirit isn’t just inside our churches, but is also inside the law of gravity.

But how do we learn that? A saint might say: “Meditate and pray long enough and you will open yourself up to the other world!” A poet might say: “Stare at a rose long enough and you’ll see that there’s more there than meets the eye!” A romantic might say: “Just fall in love real deeply or let your heart get broken and you’ll soon know there’s more to reality than can be empirically measured.”

And the mystics of old would say: “Just honour fully what you meet each day and you will find it drenched with grace and divinity.”

The IM Saturday Monks Brunch: July 21, 2018

Reaching High (2017)

The IM Saturday Monks Brunch: July 21, 2018

Anyone need a little respite from all the noise of this week? Ho-o-oly cow!

Welcome to the table where no political talk is allowed today. If you’re like me you’ve had enough of that in the past several days to last a lifetime. Instead, we’re going to focus on the feast that awaits us as we enter the very best time of year here in the heartland. This is the time for fresh tomatoes, green beans, and other delicacies from the garden. And, of course, our mouths water for the most wonderful treat of all…

This weekend, the church where my wife serves as choir director will serve close to 2000 people at their annual corn roast supper. They have discovered that this, my friends, is the secret to church growth, indeed the secret to the abundant life Jesus promised us.

Sweet corn.

I love sweet corn. It truly is better than sex! I’m not lying! All across the Midwest tonight, a husband and wife will finish what husbands and wives do, and the wife will ask the husband: “How was that?” And, if the man is honest, he’ll say “Well, it wasn’t sweet corn, but it was nice.”

• Garrison Keillor

And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet corn boiled, with the addition of salt?

• Henry David Thoreau

…roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef’s ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish.

• Rex Stout

The Corn
boiled or roasted is still a Corn.
one went through the hot waters the other through the Fire.
Still The blessed Word.

• Marie Tornyenyor

Look, I made a commitment to corn 17 years ago. Sure, I’m a man. I like to go to a barbecue and see beans that I like: baked beans, red beans, black beans, big plump garbanzos. But in the end, I always come home to my sweet, sweet corn.

• George Lopez

Plough deep, while Sluggards sleep;
And you shall have Corn, to sell and to keep.

• Benjamin Franklin

From RNS:

Catherine Pepinster reports that the Church of England is planning to include more rigorous psychological testing of those wanting to become priests. In light of the sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, this is one measure the CoE is planning to incorporate, beginning later this year.

And what kinds of psychological pathologies are they especially on the lookout for? One of the leading issues they hope to address is narcissism among prospective ministers. Pepinster writes:

In the book “Let Us Prey: The Plague of Narcissist Pastors and What We Can Do about It,” researchers R. Glenn Ball and Darrell Puls estimate, based on their 2015 study, that about a third of ministers in one mainline Protestant denomination in Canada showed signs of a narcissistic personality. Narcissists often come to apprehend God as a rival, not a loving presence, and eventually may see themselves as God.

Francis said narcissism can give pastors “a confidence in their own ability to the disparagement of others,” and a tendency to see “the black side of others rather than the contribution people make to the church. There is a temptation to bully and demean.”

A few strange news stories over at NPR:

LONDON, ENGLAND – JULY 18: Celebrating 25 years since Jurassic Park first premiered in the UK, streaming service NOW TV unveil a statue of Jeff Goldblum semi-naked torso at Potters Field on July 18, 2018 in London, England. (Photo by John Phillips/Getty Images)

And now, a musical moment of respite to help you recover from the chaos and noise of the past week…

A sad study reported at Christianity Today…

America’s religious communities are failing children with chronic health conditions such as autism, learning disabilities, depression, and conduct disorders.

And they have been doing it for a very long time, suggests a just-published national study following three waves of the National Survey of Children’s Health.

The odds of a child with autism never attending religious services were nearly twice as high as compared to children with no chronic health conditions. The odds of never attending also were significantly higher for children with developmental delays, ADD/ADHD, learning disabilities, and behavior disorders. However, the study does not provide data for specific types of religious communities, such as evangelicals.

Sanctuaries were much more sympathetic to children with health conditions such as asthma, diabetes, epilepsy, or vision problems. Those children were as likely to be in the pews as children with no health conditions.

But children with conditions that limit social interaction, who are often excluded from other social settings and have the greater need for a community of social support, were most likely to feel unwelcome at religious services.

Some soothing pictures from The Atlantic to calm the stress from this past week…

Field of sunflowers. Rieumajou, near Toulouse, southern France
Umbrellas are reflected in glasses worn by Nicolle Zappala, of Weston, Florida, as she looks at an art installation called “Umbrella Sky” on July 16, 2018, in Coral Gables, Florida.
A Chinese tourist takes a picture in a lavender field in Valensole, France, on July 13, 2018.
Performers lie on transparent boats as they rehearse for a show on the Lijiang River on July 15, 2018, in Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China.
A child plays in the waterfall at Yards Park amid warm temperatures in Washington, D.C., on July 19, 2018.
Rice Terraces in Zhaoxing, a Dong minority village in Qiandongnan’s Liping County.
A mugshot of “Bean” a pug dog, taken at the Cape May Police Department in Cape May, New Jersey. Bean the pug is back home after police in the New Jersey shore town posted the dog’s mugshot on social media. Cape May Patrolman Michael LeSage found Bean in a yard on July 15, 2018. Police posted a photo of Bean on Facebook with the caption: “This is what happens when you run away from home.” It took a few hours before Bean’s owners tracked her down.

FROM THE BBC: The world’s loneliest man…

Extremely rare video footage has emerged of a tribe member who has been called the “loneliest man in the world”.

The 50-something man has been living alone in the Brazilian Amazon for 22 years, after the last members of his tribe were murdered.

The shaky video – filmed at a distance and released by the Brazilian government’s indigenous agency, Funai – shows a muscular man cutting a tree with an axe.

The footage has been shared around the world, but there is more to it than meets the eye.

Why was he filmed?

Funai has been monitoring the man from afar since 1996, and needs to show he is still alive to renew a restriction order on the area of land he roams, in the north-west state of Rondonia.

The area – spanning around 4,000 hectares – is surrounded by private farms and deforested clearings, but the order prevents anyone from entering and endangering him.

Some favorite recent Babylon Bee headlines…

Sweet, sweet corn on the cob — the end.

There is a Boat in my Backyard too

The Ally series will continue next week

One of Michael Spencer’s most poignant posts was about a boat that sat in his backyard, a constant reminder of the relationship that he did not have with his father.   There is a boat in my backyard too. A sixteen foot, red fiberglass canoe. We bought it 40 years ago… second hand. Our family had just come back from Africa, and didn’t have much money, so second hand was all we could afford. As I have moved over the years, the boat has moved with me.

The boat is covered in scratches. In fact there are scratches upon scratches. And cracks, and repairs, and more cracks, and more repairs. And broken seats, and more repairs. And broken thwarts, and yes I had to look up the word, and more rep… oh wait, those still remains to be fixed before my next trip.

I would say that every scratch is a memory, but there are way too many scratches, and way too many memories to match them all up. Some of my earliest memories are with canoeing and camping with my father before we got this canoe.  The pictures below help capture memories I have made with my children and friends.  I want to encourage our readers to try and make your own memories with your family and friends.  It doesn’t have to cost a lot.  For us, a $200 canoe has made us more memories than we could have imagined. (You can click on the pictures to see them in greater detail.)

Memories,

 

… Of sunsets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

… Of building friendships, playing card games, songs around the campfire, marshmallows, and spider dogs.

 

 

 

 

…Of waking up in the morning after sleeping under the stars, knowing that you got to watch the Milky Way make a dazzling appearance as a cloud of light across the night sky, with the fireworks of shooting starts accompanied by the symphony of loon calls and coywolf howls.

 

… Of the early morning mist rising from the lake in front of us and the narrows behind us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

… Of needing to use a bathroom that lacked a little privacy

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memories,

 

… Of exploring into new areas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…Of seeing the island that you first camped on fifty years before

 

… Of jumping rocks and white water swimming

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

… Of playing in a waterfall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memories,


…Of setting up camp at the end of a long day of canoeing and “trying your luck” for a few minutes

 

 

 

…Of going out early in the morning and catching a fish with nearly every cast

 

 

 

 

…Of hiking into a remove lake that you knew was stocked with Rainbow Trout back in the 1950s, and finding they were still there

 

 

 

…Of tasting the freshest fish you could possibly imagine.

 

 

 

I had two more canoe trips on my bucket list.  Last year I did the first of the two.  Just me and my son.  The best companion that I could have ever wished for. One day.  Twenty-one kilometres by canoe.  Seventeen portages, with a waterfall at everyone.  We did our last portage as night was falling, and ran our last rapids in the dark, praying that there were no hidden rocks.

Here is some of the beauty of that area.

 




This old canoe of mine has hopefully two more trips in it. I am going to repeat the river trip with a friend I made not long after we first bought that canoe. And next summer there is an area of remote wilderness that I have wanted to explore for years. Then maybe it will be time to retire that old canoe for good. I think though that will keep it in the back yard so that every day I will be able to look out at the boat in the back yard and remember.

Mere Science and Christian Faith, by Greg Cootsona: Chapter 4- On a Crash Course with Hermeneutics

Mere Science and Christian Faith: Bridging the Divide with Emerging Adults, by Greg Cootsona: Chapter 4- On a Crash Course with Hermeneutics

We are reviewing the book, Mere Science and Christian Faith, by Greg Cootsona, subtitled Bridging the Divide with Emerging Adults.  Today we look at Chapter 4- On a Crash Course with Hermeneutics.  I am going to be relatively brief on this post, as we covered this subject extensively in the review of Walton and Longman’s book, The Lost World of the Flood: Mythology, Theology, and the Deluge Debate, as well as this being the subject of Chaplain Mike’s recent posts on, Genesis: Where It All Begins.

Cootsona begins this chapter with the idea that if he were to coach antagonists on how to challenge Christian faith, he’d say:

Camp out on progress.   And do so subtly.  Sell the idea that science and technology look forward and continually improve.  That today we know far more about the universe than in the first century.  That the current iPhone is faster, smaller, more exciting, and therefore better than when it first appeared in 2007.  On the other hand, present how religious knowledge always looks in the rearview mirror.  Then find a way to phrase the question, ‘Which would you rather follow—what’s new and constantly updating, or what’s old and outdated?’

Cootsona has a great point.  The law of modernity is—newer is always better.  C. S. Lewis termed this “chronological snobbery”, “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited” (Surprised by Joy (chapter 13, p. 207–208).  Lewis went on to say:

You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also “a period,” and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.

So Greg feels that to respond to the issue of ancient texts and their contemporary relevance, a great deal depends on how the Bible is viewed.  What is the Bible?  What kind of book is it, what is its nature?  These questions are the field of hermeneutics; the philosophy and methodology of text interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts.  There is no escaping this.  The idea that “I don’t interpret the Bible, I just read it” is specious; superficially plausible, but actually wrong.  The question is not whether you interpret the Bible, but whose interpretation you assume is authoritative.  Many of us regular commenters on Internet Monk, have grown up in conservative evangelicalism.  We have grown up assuming that conservative evangelical interpretation of the Bible was authoritative.  To challenge or question that version of hermeneutics was to “lose our faith”, and many of us struggled with that loss of faith. As Chaplain Mike noted, here is how we practiced that hermeneutic:

  1. Identify the issue: isolate that issue to one or two words. For example the word “day”.
  2. Get out your Strong’s Concordance and look up every instance of the word “day” in the Bible.
  3. Do an in-depth word study on the word. When you are done, you will find out that in Hebrew and Greek, the word means day.
  4. From collating and analyzing the verses, come up with a systematic statement of what the Bible says about that word.
  5. Conclusion: this is the Bible’s teaching about it.
  6. Apply your “biblical” position to a contemporary question such as “Are the days in Genesis literal days or does the Bible teach long periods of time?”

This was taking the Bible seriously, as the Word of God.  To come up with any other conclusion other than the Bible taught the world was created in six twenty-four-hour periods was to “take the word of fallible man over the infallible Word of God”.

But as many of us have since learned, that is not taking the Bible seriously at all. It is taking a collection of ancient manuscripts and treating them as a single post-Enlightenment dissertation.  It is reading scripture with a modernist mind-set and insisting that is the only way that scripture can be read.  That interpretation of scripture is actually disrespectful to both the ancient authors and their ancient audience.  It is disrespectful because it presumes that an engineering-technical-manual mode of writing is the only way that truth could be conveyed, when, in fact, that mode of writing is the worst of all ways to impart eternal spiritual truths.  It is also ironic, in that the very One to whom the Scriptures were supposed to point to spent most of his time teaching by telling stories.

Cootsona thinks that following 5 key hermeneutical principles, we’d be in a better place to engage with the sciences and to respond to the concerns of emerging adults.  First, we should remember that whatever word we use to describe our commitment to the truth and power of Scripture, we’re committed to the ultimate authority or primacy of Scripture, not to our interpretation of it.  The text is inspired, the interpretation is not.  Second is John Walton’s point that the Bible may speak to us, but it wasn’t written for us.   That is simply the historical fact at hand, if you can’t deal with it, it is your faith that is weak.

Third, as his New Testament professor Joel Green used to say, “a text without a context is a pretext”.  There is no substitute for understanding the context in which God spoke through Scripture.  It is not God-honoring to say God bypassed the ancient cultural context or is not limited by that cultural context, when God Himself chose to speak through those people in their language and idiom.  That was God’s own self-limiting choice.  We can’t simply hope to apply a passage directly to our context without taking in the original setting.

Fourth, the literal interpretation is not the only one.  Genre’ matters.  The Bible is literature.  All the components of literature– analogy, allusion, hyperbole, metaphor, parallelism, simile, and understatement are present in scripture and must be recognized for an accurate interpretation rather than a misinterpretation. As I said in the review of Lost World, biblical authors are recounting history; all history is the author giving their perspective on the event.  This is accomplished through selection—what is included as well as what’s left out—and what the author chooses to emphasize.  In that sense all history is interpretation and all historical writing is rhetorically shaped.  No author can be exhaustive in their telling of the event, so they are forced to choose what they think is important about the event.  A moment’s reflection on this shows it cannot be any other way.

The fifth point for Cootsona is this:

One final sagacious piece of hermeneutical advice I treasure to this day came through the sermons I heard as an undergraduate at First Presbyterian in Berkeley.  Earl Palmer taught us repeatedly that lean is better than luxurious.  (This parallels the scientific principle of parsimony).  Go for the leaner more humble interpretation.  And when we don’t know, it’s okay to say that too.

In the case studies for this chapter, “Making Too Much of a Good Thing—Big Bang and Fine Tuning”, Greg makes the point that while the theory that the universe had a beginning at t=0, and the observation that life would not be possible anywhere in the universe if the values of various physical constants differed by small amounts (Anthropic Fine Tuning), is consistent with a theistic view, it is not proof of a theistic view.  We shouldn’t over-sell them.  He quotes Alister McGrath (Science and Religion, 155):

The cosmological factors highlighted by cosmic fine tuning don’t offer irrefutable evidence for the existence or character of a creator God.  What would be affirmed… is that they are consistent with a theistic worldview; that they reinforce the plausibility with greatest ease with such a worldview; that they reinforce the plausibility of such a worldview for those who are already committed to them, and that they offer apologetic possibilities for those who do not yet hold a theistic position.

 

Another Look: Marge’s Funeral Service

Mom’s Funeral 2018 (alt. by MM). Photo by Hollywood Bill Merrill

Note: Last week, I re-posted the story of “Joe and Marge.” This post, also from 2012, is the follow-up to that piece.

• • •

I am glad I had the opportunity to meet many of you today. I am also glad i got to watch the video with pictures of Marge from her life over the years. One sad part of my ministry is that I only get to know people in the final season of their lives. It really helps me to see those pictures and understand more about those relationships and those stories.

I didn’t know Marge when she adopted a young daughter and raised her as her own, went to all her activities with her, and shared those joys and challenges that come with a mother-daughter relationship. I did not know her when she had a son later in life, after years of thinking she could not bear children. I wasn’t there on all the occasions portrayed in the pictures, when she held her grandchildren. It was obvious how much she loved you; you can see the pride and joy glowing in her eyes in each photograph.

No, the Marge I have known was the pretty, petite older lady who found herself wandering in the world of Alzhemier’s dementia. Even in that condition, she was pleasant and energetic. In fact, whenever I saw her she rarely sat still. She loved to look out the windows and see what was happening outside. She moved about the house, checking on things, straightening the pillows. When I came to see her, she always greeted me, always spoke to me when I greeted her, and always came and sat with Joe and me as we visited.

One thing I consistently observed was how comfortable she was in Joe’s presence and how she responded to him. Now I want to say something here, and I’m sure it will embarrass Joe. I have been a pastor more than twenty-five years and a hospice chaplain for seven and a half years, and I have never seen a better example than Joe of a spouse who loved and cared for his wife. He was protective of Marge’s routine and made sure she had everything she needed and wanted. He worked flawlessly with those of us who came to the house. He laid down his life day after day so that Marge had as comfortable and peaceful and happy a final season of life as possible — until the day she left this world, lying peacefully in her own bed, right where she wanted to be and where they wanted to be together.

The Bible says it is not our religious rituals that ultimately matter. What matters is “faith working through love.” That is what I saw in Joe and Marge. Their life over the past couple of years became simpler, but no less rich. They were more restricted in what they could do and where they could go, but whatever they did was filled with love. They may not have been able to go to church or practice specifically religious observances, but their life together was marked by faith in God’s presence and help every day.

The Bible asks us a question: “What does the Lord require of you?” What do you think about that? What does God require of us? Here is the answer it gives: “To do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

In another place it tells us, “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands…so that you behave properly toward others and not be in any need.”

Psalm 37 likewise calls us to live this kind of life. It says:

Trust in the Lord and do good;
Dwell in the land and feed on God’s faithfulness.
Delight yourself in the Lord;
And He will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord,
Trust also in Him, and He will do it.
He will bring forth your righteousness as the light
And your judgment as the noonday.

Faith working through love.

This is the kind of life Jesus himself lived. And when he died, laying down his life so that our sins might be forgiven; and when he rose again to give us new life and to send us his Holy Spirit, he made it possible for us to enter his Kingdom and live like that too. By his grace he enables us to have lives that are characterized by faith working through love.

And so, more than anything today, I want to say thank you Marge, and thank you Joe for showing all of us in real life, day after day, what faith, hope, and love look like.

I also want to remind us all that this is what will sustain us in our present time of sorrow and enable us to support each other on the journey to come, until we join Marge before God’s throne. It’s all about keeping that hope and having a faith that works through love.

• • •

Photo by Hollywood Bill Merrill at Ted Drake’s Flickr. Creative Commons License.