Warning: The title of this blog contains terrible advice. I was just thinking of Wilco’s song, “How to Fight Loneliness: Just Smile All the Time” - advice so backwards it forces you to think. People often ask me if the philosophic world is a tough place to be a Christian. The general answer in is “no”, only because everyone dislikes you if you are dumb, but everyone likes you if you are smart. Any disagreements are kept professional for the most part.
Except for the time one of my professors started talking about how harmful foreign missions were. I know this isn’t something she said thoughtlessly, as she has published an article called “Missionary Positions”, ridiculing the enterprise of missions as a whole. Since it was the end of class when she brought it up, there was no chance to respond publicly, and so I thought about talking to her directly because I was so disturbed by her comments.
I thought better of my strategy, however. Most Christians raised in the “Case for Christ” or “Evidence that Demands a Verdict” school would think of my decision as foolish. The thing to do in the face of such hostility is apologetics, as they see clearly. In contrast, I believe that reason and argument have little or nothing to do with a person’s worldview. When a person’s mind is “changed” by some argument, it is not the argument doing the changing, but the Holy Spirit – the argument is just the excuse. In a situation like that, the person I would have spoken with was far too bitter and angry to really listen to anything I had to say. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how sophisticated your argumentation skills are: when people want to remain blind, they will remain blind.
Instead of fashioning a convincing argument, I went back to my house and pledged some money to my favorite overseas Christian organization (Opportunity International). And of course, I pledged in honor of my professor. I don’t think that’s exactly what Paul meant by ‘hilarious giving’, but I sure was making myself chuckle. The only way to refute a bitter argument like that is by doing something. My (very small) contribution helps ensure that Christian missions will be alive and well long after people have forgotten her arguments.
5.16.2007
Goodbye Falwell
Two things came to an end in the past week: my blogs about homosexuality, and Jerry Falwell's controversial life. The timing is intriguing, of course, because Falwell devoted much of his life to opposing homosexuality. There are probably only two responses to the news of his passing. One is to salute a 'brave Chrsitian soldier' who fought the good fight in the culture wars. The other is to laugh, high five, and craft jokes about some of Falwell's more outrageous comments. I think subtle thinking leads us beyond these responses. In that vein, guest blogger John Foote asks this question: "How do we reflect on and remember a Godly Christian man whose life was so characterized by standing for values that not only virulently oppose my worldview, but which I believe also grieve the heart of God?" He gives the beginnings of an answer with the thoughts below. Enjoy!
Last night, shortly before I woke up, I had a dream about Dr. Futrell, a pastor from my home church in Dayton. I’m quite confident the dream wasn’t actually about him, but rather that he symbolized someone else (and something else) entirely. I saw Dr. Futrell as he was walking out of a church building that I was entering. Normally, when I’m home visiting my parents, Dr. Futrell is thrilled to see me – always interested in my family, my studies, my work prospects, and generally enthusiastic about the future of my life. When I called his name in my dream, however, he didn’t stop, but looked over his shoulder at me while walking away. He was weeping. He didn’t have much to say as he departed, except between his sobs, “my sin . . . my sin.” It became immediately evident to me that Dr. Futrell had been caught in very grave and deeply embedded sexual sin. I wasn’t sure precisely what – perhaps a pornographic addiction, or marital infidelity – but what was immensely clear to me was what he was feeling. He had such a deep remorse and regret for the sin that he had cherished and hidden for so long. I thought, during my dream, about that terrible feeling that comes from the unrelenting conviction of God, from realizing that God is intent on exposing your sin and there isn’t anything you can do to hide it any longer. I felt a portion of the great sadness that enveloped Dr. Futrell as the realization of the consequences of his sin hit me. He would lose his position of stature in the church. He would almost certainly have to leave the congregation and find a new spiritual home. I felt that his wife wouldn’t be leaving him, but I also felt that she was agonized and devastated beyond anything she’d ever known. The pain and fear I felt in this dream was enough to cause me to awaken suddenly. I had no suspicions that it might be prophetic, in fact, I was quite immediately assured it had nothing to do with Dr. Futrell, but everything to do with me. I felt the conviction of the Holy Spirit that I must be relentless in confessing every hidden sin of my life, lest it grow into an independently living creature over which I could no longer exert authority. I lay in bed immediately confessing my sin and telling my Father in heaven that I wanted at all costs to avoid the type of heartbreak that I had just so intimately observed.
Dr. Jerry Falwell died this morning, about 3 hours after I woke up. I did not know him personally, but in the words of Billy Graham, “his accomplishments went beyond most clergy of his generation.” As a consequence of his great prominence in the public eye, I was frequently reminded of his opinions about almost every morally and politically sensitive issue of our day, and the extent to which he believed and hoped that his opinion was reflective of the majority of evangelical Christians in the United States. Dr. Falwell was an opponent of all things immoral and he seldom vague or ambiguous about his convictions. He lived a life of relative moral strength, avoiding the moral entrapments which befell some of his contemporaries in the 1980s. He opposed homosexuality, abortion, homosexuals, feminists, feminism, the Equal Rights Amendment, pornography, gambling, rock & roll, President Clinton, Teletubbies, and he opposed them vigorously. He opposed these things so much that his opposition to them became virtually synonymous with his name. These causes, and the people who engaged in them, were his enemies, and against his enemies he crusaded. In his obituary on MSNBC.com, the only mention of "love" was an early-life account that he had a burning passion to serve Christ, and that he had great affection for the students who attended the fundamentalist college he founded.
When I think of the most fundamental character of a life with Jesus, I think of love. Specifically, I think of loving God and loving one’s enemies, of loving one’s neighbor as oneself, regardless of whom that neighbor may be. I can’t think of many men or women of faith whose lives have been more characterized by opposing their enemies (while certainly loving their friends) than the late Dr. Falwell. This troubles me greatly. I wonder what Dr. Falwell experienced this morning around 10:45am as he passed from one realm of life to another. I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t like the remorse Dr. Futrell felt in my dream. An utterly tragic and devastated brokenness overflowing with remorse and the terror that what has been hidden will remain hidden no more. To quote Billy Graham again, I too believe that Dr. Falwell was “a man of God”, and am confident that he sought to serve God faithfully during his life, and that he is one whom God had chosen as his own. Without speculating about that which is not fruitful, my heart is merely broken on behalf of a brother in Christ who sought to love God and missed some of the most key values of the kingdom. How the Father longed to fill Jerry’s heart with love for his enemies . . . with a love that would rescue them from their darkness rather than confine them to it! How he longs to purge our hearts as well, for us to confess our sin and be rescued sooner rather than later.
Last night, shortly before I woke up, I had a dream about Dr. Futrell, a pastor from my home church in Dayton. I’m quite confident the dream wasn’t actually about him, but rather that he symbolized someone else (and something else) entirely. I saw Dr. Futrell as he was walking out of a church building that I was entering. Normally, when I’m home visiting my parents, Dr. Futrell is thrilled to see me – always interested in my family, my studies, my work prospects, and generally enthusiastic about the future of my life. When I called his name in my dream, however, he didn’t stop, but looked over his shoulder at me while walking away. He was weeping. He didn’t have much to say as he departed, except between his sobs, “my sin . . . my sin.” It became immediately evident to me that Dr. Futrell had been caught in very grave and deeply embedded sexual sin. I wasn’t sure precisely what – perhaps a pornographic addiction, or marital infidelity – but what was immensely clear to me was what he was feeling. He had such a deep remorse and regret for the sin that he had cherished and hidden for so long. I thought, during my dream, about that terrible feeling that comes from the unrelenting conviction of God, from realizing that God is intent on exposing your sin and there isn’t anything you can do to hide it any longer. I felt a portion of the great sadness that enveloped Dr. Futrell as the realization of the consequences of his sin hit me. He would lose his position of stature in the church. He would almost certainly have to leave the congregation and find a new spiritual home. I felt that his wife wouldn’t be leaving him, but I also felt that she was agonized and devastated beyond anything she’d ever known. The pain and fear I felt in this dream was enough to cause me to awaken suddenly. I had no suspicions that it might be prophetic, in fact, I was quite immediately assured it had nothing to do with Dr. Futrell, but everything to do with me. I felt the conviction of the Holy Spirit that I must be relentless in confessing every hidden sin of my life, lest it grow into an independently living creature over which I could no longer exert authority. I lay in bed immediately confessing my sin and telling my Father in heaven that I wanted at all costs to avoid the type of heartbreak that I had just so intimately observed.
Dr. Jerry Falwell died this morning, about 3 hours after I woke up. I did not know him personally, but in the words of Billy Graham, “his accomplishments went beyond most clergy of his generation.” As a consequence of his great prominence in the public eye, I was frequently reminded of his opinions about almost every morally and politically sensitive issue of our day, and the extent to which he believed and hoped that his opinion was reflective of the majority of evangelical Christians in the United States. Dr. Falwell was an opponent of all things immoral and he seldom vague or ambiguous about his convictions. He lived a life of relative moral strength, avoiding the moral entrapments which befell some of his contemporaries in the 1980s. He opposed homosexuality, abortion, homosexuals, feminists, feminism, the Equal Rights Amendment, pornography, gambling, rock & roll, President Clinton, Teletubbies, and he opposed them vigorously. He opposed these things so much that his opposition to them became virtually synonymous with his name. These causes, and the people who engaged in them, were his enemies, and against his enemies he crusaded. In his obituary on MSNBC.com, the only mention of "love" was an early-life account that he had a burning passion to serve Christ, and that he had great affection for the students who attended the fundamentalist college he founded.
When I think of the most fundamental character of a life with Jesus, I think of love. Specifically, I think of loving God and loving one’s enemies, of loving one’s neighbor as oneself, regardless of whom that neighbor may be. I can’t think of many men or women of faith whose lives have been more characterized by opposing their enemies (while certainly loving their friends) than the late Dr. Falwell. This troubles me greatly. I wonder what Dr. Falwell experienced this morning around 10:45am as he passed from one realm of life to another. I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t like the remorse Dr. Futrell felt in my dream. An utterly tragic and devastated brokenness overflowing with remorse and the terror that what has been hidden will remain hidden no more. To quote Billy Graham again, I too believe that Dr. Falwell was “a man of God”, and am confident that he sought to serve God faithfully during his life, and that he is one whom God had chosen as his own. Without speculating about that which is not fruitful, my heart is merely broken on behalf of a brother in Christ who sought to love God and missed some of the most key values of the kingdom. How the Father longed to fill Jerry’s heart with love for his enemies . . . with a love that would rescue them from their darkness rather than confine them to it! How he longs to purge our hearts as well, for us to confess our sin and be rescued sooner rather than later.
5.07.2007
Homosexuality IX
This is the final blog on the topic of homosexuality in the Bible. I started by challenging the idea that just because God did not create or sanction homosexuality does not imply that it is prohibited. That sort of thinking is popular, as we see from the passage from John that I mentioned: “Who sinned”, the disciples asked, “that this man was born blind?” This is familiar but flawed logic: if God didn’t intend something, it must be evil.
Having shown the “natural law” argument to be on dubious grounds, we turned to Scripture itself, which is often thought to give several unambiguous condemnations of homosexuality. There are some passages which may speak against homosexuality, but there is simply no way of knowing. For example, Paul could have had homosexual men in mind when he condemned “soft men” in the New Testament, but we simply have to be smarter than the translators of the ESV who just assumed that Paul was condemning homosexuality there.
If you aren’t sure, just admit you’re not sure. We’re on a “need to know” basis with God, and there are simply many things we do not need to know to lead holy lives and spend our days talking about the need for everyone to experience salvation. Many wish that God would have revealed more of His thoughts, but he didn’t. I personally am glad – after all, “knowledge puffs up,” but “love builds up.” If God had wanted us to know more about the homosexual lifestyle, it would be in there somewhere. There would have been some verse, like “I hate divorce”. This verse leaves no doubt that God hates divorce, but if my arguments of the last few weeks have been sound, there is simply no similar verse about homosexuality or homosexual behavior. There are a few kinds of homosexuality condemned:
• Homosexuality that stems from rebellious worship
• Homosexuality that is pederastic or otherwise exploitive.
• Homosexual prostitution
But of course this tells us nothing of God’s thoughts on the actual homosexual condition anymore than condemning adulterers implies a condemnation of heterosexuality.
I’ll leave this topic with one fact I can’t get over. In Genesis 19, a town-full of men tried to gang-rape some of Lot’s visitors. He resisted on the grounds that they were foreigners and therefore they should not be degraded like that. Then, in Ezekiel 16, we finally learn why Sodom was destroyed: economic inequality. And still, some people label any homosexual male a “sodomite”. If the Evangelical church hopes to remain relevant to my son’s generation, we are simply going to need more subtle thinking than that.
Having shown the “natural law” argument to be on dubious grounds, we turned to Scripture itself, which is often thought to give several unambiguous condemnations of homosexuality. There are some passages which may speak against homosexuality, but there is simply no way of knowing. For example, Paul could have had homosexual men in mind when he condemned “soft men” in the New Testament, but we simply have to be smarter than the translators of the ESV who just assumed that Paul was condemning homosexuality there.
If you aren’t sure, just admit you’re not sure. We’re on a “need to know” basis with God, and there are simply many things we do not need to know to lead holy lives and spend our days talking about the need for everyone to experience salvation. Many wish that God would have revealed more of His thoughts, but he didn’t. I personally am glad – after all, “knowledge puffs up,” but “love builds up.” If God had wanted us to know more about the homosexual lifestyle, it would be in there somewhere. There would have been some verse, like “I hate divorce”. This verse leaves no doubt that God hates divorce, but if my arguments of the last few weeks have been sound, there is simply no similar verse about homosexuality or homosexual behavior. There are a few kinds of homosexuality condemned:
• Homosexuality that stems from rebellious worship
• Homosexuality that is pederastic or otherwise exploitive.
• Homosexual prostitution
But of course this tells us nothing of God’s thoughts on the actual homosexual condition anymore than condemning adulterers implies a condemnation of heterosexuality.
I’ll leave this topic with one fact I can’t get over. In Genesis 19, a town-full of men tried to gang-rape some of Lot’s visitors. He resisted on the grounds that they were foreigners and therefore they should not be degraded like that. Then, in Ezekiel 16, we finally learn why Sodom was destroyed: economic inequality. And still, some people label any homosexual male a “sodomite”. If the Evangelical church hopes to remain relevant to my son’s generation, we are simply going to need more subtle thinking than that.
5.02.2007
Homosexuality in Leviticus, Part VIII
The final two passages which are sometimes used as arguments against homosexuality are from Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13:
“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (18:22)
“If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them” (20:13)
The oft-used phrase “homosexuality is an abomination” comes from these verses, and based on the wide usage of that phrase it is obvious that these verses have an immediate intuitive appeal to many. Those are indeed harsh words.
But we first must realize that there are many prohibitions given in Leviticus that we no longer consider relevant. For instance, the interceding chapter (19) gives a strange order in v. 27: “You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard”. And of course, your choice of facial hair has long since become regarded as morally irrelevant. So the question is, why do we keep some prohibitions but not others?
The usual answer that is given is that there are two motivations for the laws in Leviticus: a law is either for the sake of cleanliness (or religious symbolism), or for the sake of morality. This makes sense – we don’t sacrifice our children (20:4) because that is still morally wrong, but we don’t banish from our society two married people who have sex during the woman’s menstrual period (20:18). One law is for the sake of morality, but the latter is for the sake of cleanliness. Any law that is no longer relevant for keeping clean, such as the famous prohibitions of mold growth, we freely discard.
Many then assume that 18:22 and 20:13 are for the sake of morality rather than for the sake of cleanliness. But is this a good assumption? It indeed seems like it could be for the sake of cleanliness, for we know at least that the particular act mentioned there is a disease-spreading act. Furthermore, there are no prohibitions on other forms of male homosexual behavior. Why weren’t those prohibited? And why wasn’t same-sex female activity also condemned?
A possible answer to the last question is that the law didn’t really talk much about females anyway, so we should assume that the prohibition extends to them. But that is not true, and we see this from both passages. For instance, 20:15 prohibits males from bestiality, but then females get their own verse forbidding bestiality in 16. Moses thought that for whatever reason there had to be separate prohibitions for males and females in that case. But two verses before, he only condemns one form of male homosexuality. The asymmetry could very well be because the prohibition about ‘lying with a man as with a women’ is for the sake of cleanliness. Otherwise, we should expect to see a corresponding condemnation of female same-sex activity, since if it were for the sake of morality, the female version of the act should fall under the same condemnation. This is at least as compelling an interpretation as the one that thinks that it is a moral prohibition.
“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (18:22)
“If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them” (20:13)
The oft-used phrase “homosexuality is an abomination” comes from these verses, and based on the wide usage of that phrase it is obvious that these verses have an immediate intuitive appeal to many. Those are indeed harsh words.
But we first must realize that there are many prohibitions given in Leviticus that we no longer consider relevant. For instance, the interceding chapter (19) gives a strange order in v. 27: “You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard”. And of course, your choice of facial hair has long since become regarded as morally irrelevant. So the question is, why do we keep some prohibitions but not others?
The usual answer that is given is that there are two motivations for the laws in Leviticus: a law is either for the sake of cleanliness (or religious symbolism), or for the sake of morality. This makes sense – we don’t sacrifice our children (20:4) because that is still morally wrong, but we don’t banish from our society two married people who have sex during the woman’s menstrual period (20:18). One law is for the sake of morality, but the latter is for the sake of cleanliness. Any law that is no longer relevant for keeping clean, such as the famous prohibitions of mold growth, we freely discard.
Many then assume that 18:22 and 20:13 are for the sake of morality rather than for the sake of cleanliness. But is this a good assumption? It indeed seems like it could be for the sake of cleanliness, for we know at least that the particular act mentioned there is a disease-spreading act. Furthermore, there are no prohibitions on other forms of male homosexual behavior. Why weren’t those prohibited? And why wasn’t same-sex female activity also condemned?
A possible answer to the last question is that the law didn’t really talk much about females anyway, so we should assume that the prohibition extends to them. But that is not true, and we see this from both passages. For instance, 20:15 prohibits males from bestiality, but then females get their own verse forbidding bestiality in 16. Moses thought that for whatever reason there had to be separate prohibitions for males and females in that case. But two verses before, he only condemns one form of male homosexuality. The asymmetry could very well be because the prohibition about ‘lying with a man as with a women’ is for the sake of cleanliness. Otherwise, we should expect to see a corresponding condemnation of female same-sex activity, since if it were for the sake of morality, the female version of the act should fall under the same condemnation. This is at least as compelling an interpretation as the one that thinks that it is a moral prohibition.
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