What Evil is Not

The Whore of Babylon, by Albrecht Durer

Tomorrow morning at Redeemer I will preach out of Revelation 19:11-21. I'll talk about the final eradication of evil, and emphasize:

• What "evil" is (I will define "evil")
• Why evil, given a correct understanding of, must be eliminated
• What John sees when "heaven is opened"
• What an "open heaven" means, and why we might expect it (even tomorrow morning)

I will share what "evil" is not, for the sake of clearing away some big-time misconceptions that lead to theological weirdness.

Evil is not some bodiless force that somehow gets into people and corrupts them, like lead in water gets into a person and makes them sick.

          Or like a poison gas.  Or like tear gas.

“Good” is not some invisible force, either.

“Love” is not some invisible force – like “love is in the air.”

The "Star Wars" idea, fun though it is, is philosophically ignorant. There's not a "dark side" nor a good "Force" that somehow gets into people, bringing either corruption or flourishing.

Much more tomorrow morning... 

Pastoral Leadership - If Growth, then Pain

My back yard on the river

If G, then C.
If C, then L.
If L, then P.
Therefore, If G, then P.

This form of reasoning is called hypothetical syllogism.

If we substitute for G "Growth," for C "Change," for L "Loss," and for P "Pain," we get this:

If Growth, then Change.

If Change, then Loss.

If Loss, then Pain.

Therefore, if Growth, then Pain.

If the first premise true? Definitely! Growth implies change. The tree in my front yard is growing. Therefore, it is changing. It is not the same tree it was yesterday.

Is the second premise true? Yes. To change is to leave something behind. Whenever something becomes new, something old is gone. Fifteen years ago we changed the name of our church. We introduced this to our people and gave them a year to pray about this. Leaving behind the old name was hard for some. We realized this, and wanted to be sensitive to the felt loss.

Is the third premise true? Not entirely. When a cancerous tumor shrinks, the loss of cancer cells is good. In this case where there is loss, there is relief. But it is often true that when a person's heart changes, or the heart of an organization changes, the resultant loss is painful. The resultant loss confirms staying power of the Seven last Words of an Organization, which are: "We've Never Done It That Way Before."

Any church that wants to go forward with God has to keep changing. Otherwise it will wither and die. This is especially hard for pastor-leaders because of Peter Drucker's list of the four most difficult jobs in America, which are:

1. President of the United States
2. University president
3. CEO of a hospital
4. Pastor

Le Point Vierge Où l'on Rencontre Dieu

Monroe County

Yes, I did study French. I had to pass reading exams in philosophical French and philosophical German for my doctoral program in philosophical theology . I bought a couple of books and taught myself to read these languages. Now years have gone by and if you don't use it you lose it. But I still recognize some things, like this:

Le point vierge où l'on rencontre Dieu.

Which means:

The virgin point of the spirit where one meets God, and which is the glory of God in us.

This is how Thomas Merton referred to the inner sanctuary of the heart where the God encounter takes place. This is a "still point of presence" around which Merton's life circled.

Kathleen Deignan writes that Merton "labored to name this mysterious center of being, 'a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will." (Merton, A Book of Hours, 30)

I have dwelt in this place for many years. Even this morning. Right now. This is where the Father comes to make his home in me. (See here.)

The place of peace.

The Safety of Praying; The Danger of Prayerlessness

Monroe County

Last week I taught another Spiritual Formation class at Payne Theological Seminary. My desire is to co-labor with God to implant a greater praying, abiding life in pastors and Christian leaders.

My experience over the years, from student feedback, is that the majority of North American pastors do not have a significant praying life. By "significant" I mean: like Jesus had. It was customary and habitual for Jesus to exit to lonely places to met with God and pray. It should be the same for his followers. 

When someone acquires a praying life they encounter God in fresh, beautiful experiences. This is the allure and benefit of habitual, focused, attentive praying. When this is discovered one can no longer go without it. And, one becomes a safe person.

When a Christian leader has no time for this they are a danger to themselves and to others, as well as being inauthentic and irrelevant (to the plans and purposes of God, since they live as a disconnected branch).

The danger of prayerlessness is well-expressed by Ruth Haley Barton:

"Without the regular experience of being received and loved by God in solitude and silence, we are vulnerable to a kind of leadership that is driven by profound emptiness that we are seeking to fill through performance and achievement. This unconscious striving is very dangerous for us and for those around us; it will eventually burn us out (since there is no amount of achievement that will ultimately satisfy the emptiness of the human soul), and the people we work with will eventually notice that they are mere cogs in the wheel of our own ego-driven plans." (Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry, p. 126)

Jesus Healed People

St Mary's Bridge in Monroe

News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them.
- Matthew 4:24

Over the years I’ve seen people healed after praying for them. One of them was my grandmother. 

Grandma lived with us 6 months out of every year when I was growing up. When she was in her mid-80s she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She decided not to have it medically treated. The cancerous tumors in her breasts grew. My mother used to bathe her, and visually saw and physically touched the hard, growing tumors.

Grandma knew she was going to die. She had lived a long life, and was ready to leave this world for another one. She even bought the dress she wanted to be buried in.

Grandma spent what we assumed would be her last 6 months in our home. Still alive, she went to live with my aunt and uncle who cared for her during the other 6 months. One day my aunt called. She told my mother that, while bathing Grandma, she noticed the tumors did not appear to be there. My mother could not believe this, yet wanted to believe . Mom traveled 400 miles from Rockford, Illinois to Michigan's Upper Peninsula to visually inspect Grandma and confirm this.

Grandma lived for 12 more years. She bought three more dresses to be buried in. She died at age 97. What happened? How can we explain this? I, my mother, my aunt, and grandma concluded two things:

1. Grandma once was cancer-filled.
2. Then one day the cancer was gone.
3. We all believed (I still conclude) that God healed Grandma (using inference to the best explanation).

Jesus, when he walked the earth, healed people. His healings were demonstrations of the main message he proclaimed, which was about "the kingdom of God." The idea is this: where the kingdom of God is, physical and emotional illnesses are not. When "this present age" finally gives way to "the age to come," followers of Jesus shall dwell with him forevermore. Eternal life is a tearless, non-suffering existence. How weird, how incomplete, how irrational would eternal life be if it contained things like cancer and mental illness.

When the Word became flesh and dwelt among us the age to come entered this present darkness. Light came into the world. Jesus's healings were demonstrations of that truth, which was: the kingdom of God is now in our midst.

Have I prayed for people who, as far as I can tell, were not healed? Yes. Have I seen people healed as a result of praying? Yes. Therefore I pray. 

Jesus came to heal. Jesus still heals. Bring your woundedness and infirmity to him today.

***
NOTE:

John Wimber's book Power Healing is still one of the best texts on this subject available. It was the forward by Richard Foster that convinced me to read it.

The work of University of Indiana scholar Candy Brown is important here. See Candy'sTesting Prayer: Science and Healing;  and Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing. 

See Candy's Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Proximal Intercessory Prayer (STEPP) on Auditory and Visual Impairments in Rural Mozambique. Candy traveled with Heidi Baker in Mozambique, bringing audiometric testing devices and visual acuity devices, testing persons before and after receiving "proximal intercessory prayer" for visual and hearing disorders.

See also Craig Keener massive, brilliant Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. 
Here are some posts I've written on healing. 

Testing Prayer; Science and Healing, by Candy Gunther Brown

Prayer & Divine Healing

If Someone Doesn't Believe Jesus Healed People

Why Doesn't God Heal Everybody?

"Ordinary" Christians as Agents of Healing: Candy Brown on Randy Clark & Global Awakening

5 Key Aspects of a Pentecostal Worldview

Praying Is an Act of Protest

Pottery by Gary Wilson

One result of a habitual praying life is that God removes unrighteous anger from my heart. God takes the chip off my shoulder. He softens the edge. He forms His heart of compassion in me for my enemies. He frees me from the prison cell of hatred, and releases me to love in ways I have never done before. 

For me this is not a theory but an empirical, existential reality. My wife Linda has seen the results. I am a better husband as Christ is more deeply formed in me. I get changed. Much of this happens as I am praying. 

In praying I become clay on a potter's wheel. I am not the shaping agent of my own transformation, God is. Many times I can feel Him shaping me.

This is praying as an act of resistance to the common, unholy structures of the world which demand conformation to their will. To pray is to protest against the hate-filled standards of our culture. In solitary praying I am protesting against the world which wants to shape my heart into its forms of destruction, hatred, manipulation, competition, suspicion, defensiveness, and war.

In praying I give witness to God whose love is all-healing and all-embracing. I protest against the world by declaring “Hands off me!”

How America's Drug Epidemic Has Spread

New York Times

The Love of Bondage and the Fear of Freedom

Facing evil

Many love their bondage. It is their place of familiarity, the zone of comfort. They return to it like dogs return to their vomit.

The abused wife divorces and marries another abuser. The incarcerated drug felon is released only to return to heroin, and prison, again. The careless spender becomes financially free only to return to economic bondage.

Thomas Merton wrote:

"How can I receive the seeds of freedom if I am in love with slavery and how can I cherish the desire of God if I am filled with another and an opposite desire? God cannot plant His liberty in me because I am a prisoner and I do not even desire to be free. I love my captivity and I imprison myself in the desire for the things that I hate, and I have hardened my heart against true love. (Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 16)

To stay free one must hate bondage, and choose and act from this hatred. "I must learn therefore to let go of the familiar and the usual and consent to what is new and unknown to me." (Ib.)

Freedom is the place of unfamiliarity. When Jesus says "Behold, I make all things new," he inspires fear. This requires change and faith. Change means newness of being; faith is stepping into the new unknown.

Spiritual transformation is constant movement from familiarity to unfamiliarity, from bondage to freedom. The transformation is, among other things, the morphing of desire. The love/hate relationship between bondage and freedom inverts, usually slowly, to a hate/love relationship between the same. When this happens (and I have seen it happen in many people) one never returns to the old, once-familiar chains.

"If these seeds would take root in my liberty, and if His will would grow from my freedom, I would become the love that He is, and my harvest would be His glory and my own joy." (Ib., 17)

The Uncanniness of the Ordinary

Stanley Cavell

One of my more precocious philosophy students approached me and said, "Did you know that we are more than 90% air?" Yes. 

"Trees," wrote physicist Richard Feynman, "are made of air primarily." Physicist Max Tegmark writes:

"Physicists have known for a century that solid steel is mostly empty space, because the atomic nuclei that make up 99.95% of the mass are tiny balls that fill up merely 0.0000000000001% of the volume, and that this near-vacuum only feels solid because the electrical forces that hold these nuclei in place are very strong." (Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, 4) 

Harvard Philosopher Stanley Cavell, following Wittgenstein (that great deconstructor of linguistic appearances), is interested in probing "the uncanniness of the ordinary." Which means, what? Things like: that we exist; that a world exists; whether we have a place in the order of things; how we respond to suffering and death; how do we live this life; what does it mean to live well; and so on. 

The deeper one goes into "ordinary things and events" the more extraordinary they appear to be. The Pre-Socratics plus Plato and Aristotle were on to this idea; viz., what you see (what appears to be) is not necessarily what you get (what really is). This is the paradox of analysis; viz., the more you know the less you know.

Many of my students are interested in these kind of questions and want to discuss them. Their educational background has to this point largely hindered them from going after the Big Questions. Baylor University philosopher Thomas Hibbs, in his article "Stanley Cavell's Philosophical Improvisations" (The Chronicle of Higher Education), cites Cavell and others who are critical of today's higher educational institutions for failing to address these questions. Hibbs quotes Alasdair MacIntyre, who argues that "neither the university nor philosophy is any longer seen as engaging the questions" of "plain persons."" These are questions that thinkers like MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Cavell have dedicated their lives to addressing.

Universities systematically fail to situate students within a "big picture." MacIntyre says: "In contemporary American universities, each academic discipline is treated as autonomous and self-defining, so that its practitioners, or at least the most prestigious and influential among them, prescribe to those entering the discipline what its scope and limits are. And in order to excel in any one particular discipline, one need in general know little or nothing about any of the others." 

Hibbs writes: "Returning philosophy to the concern of ordinary human persons and showing how it might speak across disciplinary lines of inquiry are not easy tasks. But the life and career of Cavell testify not just to the possibility of such achievements but also to just how rich the results can be."

I wish you could see the eyes of many of my students as I introduce them to the philosophical issues surrounding the problem of suffering and evil. All of us face such things. What sense can we make of them? The discussion seems, to them and to me, enormously relevant and significant. When I present, in my logic classes, things like Peter Singer's argument for infanticide and Richard Dawkins's argument for aborting Down Syndrome babies, there is a lot of lively discussion!

In 1986 Cavell delivered the Tanner Lectures at Stanford University and entitled his presentation "The Uncanniness of the Ordinary." Cavell, whose mentor was ordinary-language philosopher J.L. Austin, turns his attention to everyday things (the "everyday"). The "everyday" is both eminently relevant and philosophically dense and interesting. 

Commenting on Wittgenstein's thoughts on everydayness Marjorie Perloff writes:

"What is the use of studying philosophy if it doesn't improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life? It is the pressing question Wittgenstein asked himself throughout his career as a philosopher. As early as 1913 in the Notes on Logic, he wrote, "In philosophy there are no deductions: it is purely descriptive. Philosophy gives no pictures of reality." (3) And a few years later, he made the following riddling entry in the manuscript that was to become the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. But of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer." (T #6.52)"

Philosophy and religion are the two main contributors to issues regarding the "problems of life." These involve our own selves and the world that is right before our eyes. The ordinary and everyday turn out to be not so mundane after all. We are taken deeper and discover "the fantastic in what human beings will accustom themselves to... the surrealism of the habitual." (Stanford address, 4)

3 Nights of Marriage Strengthening in January with Linda and John Piippo

Linda and I invite you to join us in January for 3 Nights of Marriage Strengthening!

WHEN: January 17, 24, 31

6 - 8 PM

WHERE: Redeemer Fellowship Church
5305 Evergreen
Monroe, Michigan

Sign up in the church lobby or by calling our office at 734-731-1709.

We're working on hopefully providing babysitting. TBA.

We'll be using the "I Love You More" video + workbook curriculum by Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott.

Couples will need to purchase workbooks which accompany the videos: Here for men; here for women. ($8.99 apiece. If you cannot afford the workbooks please let me know.)

In I Love You More, a video-based study, Doctors Les and Leslie Parrott show you how the same forces that can chip away at a marriage can instead become the catalyst for new relational depth and richness--provided you make wise choices. Whether the problem is major or mild, you'll learn how to transform nettlesome issues into loving opportunities. 

We'll do 2 17-minute sessions per evening. The topics are:

1. I Love You More, Session 1 "Love Is Not Enough"

In Session 1, "Love Is Not Enough," you will discuss unrealistic expectations you brought into your marriage and discern how you can strengthen your marriage from conflicts.

2. I Love You More, Session 2 "Tackle This Problem First...and All Others Get Easier"

In Session 2, "Tackle this Problem First... and All Others Get Easier," you will discuss attitudes that exist in your marriage and which ones need to be changed.

3. I Love You More, Session 3 "The Subtle Saboteurs of Every Marriage"

In Session 3, "The Subtle Saboteurs of Every Marriage," you will discuss how busyness has crept into your marriage and learn how crabbiness can negatively impact your relationship.

4. I Love You More, Session 4 "How to Solve Any Problem in Five (not-so-easy) Steps"

In Session 4, "How to Solve Any Problem in Five (not-so-easy) Steps," you will discover the five tools you can use to tackle problems of any kind and learn how to take responsibility in your relationship.

5. I Love You More, Session 5 "Joining Your Spirits Like Never Before"

In Session 5, "Joining Your Spirits Like Never Before," you will discuss the difficulty in creating and maintaining spiritual connections and learn what you can do to bring more spiritual intimacy into your marriage.

6. I Love You More, Session 6 "The Good that Comes from a Problem-Solving Marriage"

In Session 6, "The Good that Comes from a Problem-Solving Marriage," you will discern which blessing of marriage you most appreciate and what you appreciate about your marriage relationship and express how your marriage makes you happy.