Spiritual Formation at Redeemer Ministry School

I am so looking forward to being with the students tomorrow in my Spiritual Formation class at Redeemer Ministry School.

We'll worship from 9-9:30 AM.

Then class from 9:30 - 1, with a half hour break for lunch.

Students should bring their Bibles.

In Praise of Singleness

RMS circle of prayer

When I became a Jesus-follower God told me to lay off trying to hustle women and take a full year off dating. I did. It was a wonderful year for me. I began to find out about what Colossians 1:18 calls "the supremacy of Christ." Christ was now my "head," and I was part of his "body," the body of Christ, his "Church." (Col. 1:18 again)

I felt free from cultural pressure to date. My life-goal was no longer to find some "soul mate," because my soul was now mated to Christ. The life-goal was to find Christ and be found in him. I was beginning to understand this. And, I was allowing to God to change me in ways that would be good for any future relationship I might be in.

If you are not dating, or not married, give thanks to God. You have a Pauline opportunity (1 Corinthians 7:8) to draw so very close to the only One who purely loves your soul and who, BTW, created you. Take advantage of this and rejoice!

If you feel pressure to date and mate ask yourself, where does this come from? I have seen Christian parents who lay pressure on their children to date and get married. Too many times the child ends up marrying anybody just to please, at least unconsciously, their mother and father. This pressure, indeed any such pressure, is not from God. It creates the idolatrous idea that marriage is life's greatest thing. Like any false god, this will let you down.

I've seen a lot of "Christian" marriages that are toxic, not because of "irreconcilable differences" or "incompatibility," but because of spiritual and emotional immaturity. These marriages are particularly hellish because both partners are Christians. If you are not in a marriage like this give thanks, for you have been spared from a very dark existence. And be thankful if you are not in a world where adult babies are making babies.

Simply because a husband and wife are Christians does not guarantee their marriage will be wonderful. There is a ton of ongoing marital work to be done, and this never ends. Few people count the cost of marriage and end up paying in ways they never imagined.

There's nothing wrong in desiring and praying for a life partner. There is something wrong with the idea that life will never be flourishing without one. Imagine how Christ feels about that!

What if you are in a marriage that is screwed up? See my post - How to Save Your Failing Marriage.

Philosophical Naturalism and the Illusion of "Freethinking"

Detroit

I think atheism entails philosophical naturalism (PN). That is, were I an atheist, I'd be a PN-er and unashamedly so.

PN is the view that all that is, is material. There are no non-material things. This, spirits and angels and demons do not exist, and of course a non-physical being like God could not exist. "Mind," also, does not exist, as also "free will" does not exist, if by "free" one means some reality that is free of matter and causally affects the physical brain. PN is the view that "reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural’,and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the ‘human spirit’." ("Naturalism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

OK. But as a PN-atheist I'd have some concerns as regards the logical coherence of PN. For one, PN inwardly contradicts itself. Philosopher David B. Stewart writes:

"If all causes are material in nature— and the vast majority of naturalists believe that all causes are material— then what is the source of human rationality? Concerning this dilemma J. B. S. Haldane wrote, "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. . . . And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms." 

Naturalists want to believe that they are being rational. We see this in the titles they assign to themselves and their publications: "freethinkers," "free inquiry," etc. But in fact their beliefs serve to undermine our confidence in our own rationality. [Emphasis mine. I have always seen PN this way, and nothing I have read over the decades suffices to remove my concerns. So, on PN-atheism, there is no such thing as "freethinking," since "freethinking" is a vestige of something like, e.g., a substance dualism wherein immaterial objects are possible.]

Atheist Patricia Churchland puts it thus: "Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F's: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. . . . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism's way of life and enhances the organism's chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost."" (Stewart, "The Insufficiency of Naturalism: A Worldview Critique, in William Lane Craig and Paul Copan, Come Let Us Reason: New Essays in Christian Apologetics, Kindle Locations 1639-1649)

High Christology at Redeemer Next Sunday

Next Sunday's message (9/23/12) is on Colossians 1:19-20. This is the completion of this very high Christological section.

It reads: 19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood,shed on the cross.

I have been studying Christology for 40 years, to include focusing on it in my doctoral work (on the ancient Christology of the Church Fathers). I never get tired of preaching and teaching on these things. God is going to do a good thing at Redeemer as we focus on and lift up these verses!

Why Some Arabs Are So Easily Offended

Stanford University's Fouad Ajami has an excellent piece in today's Washington Post - "Why Is the Arab World So Easily Offended?"

"Modernity requires the willingness to be offended. And as anti-American violence across the Middle East and beyond shows, that willingness is something the Arab world, the heartland of Islam, still lacks."

How Many Christians & Atheists in America

According to the 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life...

• 51 percent are Protestant
• 12 percent are unaffiliated
• 2 percent are Jewish
• 4 percent are Atheist/Agnostic
• less than 1 percent are Muslim
• 2 percent are Mormon
• and 4 percent identify with all other religious groups.

For the full statistics go here.

Preaching Tomorrow on Colossians 1:18

Monroe's Woodland Cemetery

At Redeemer we're preaching through the Christology of the letters of Paul. Tomorrow it's just one verse: Colossians 1:18, which reads:

And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.




This is high Christology. I love this verse!

In my message I will do things like:

• explain "head" of the body
• define "church" (it's not to be thought of - at all!!! - as a "building" Christians go to)
• the importance of the resurrection
• the supremacy, the preeminence, of Christ...
• ... in all things
• stand back and watch Christ lead, tomorrow morning, throughout the "service" (Jesus is the now-Lord of even the worship service)

Everything in all of life, both inside and outside the "church," exists to make Christ look good.

How Can God Exist if We Cannot See Him?

My back yard

Recently a precocious grade-schooler asked me the question: how can God exist if we cannot see him? Here's my response.

1. Since God is, by definition, omnipresent (simultaneously present to all times and places) God cannot have a physical body as we have. That would limit God to spatial and temporal conditions. That is, because God is everywhere-present, it makes no sense for God to have the kind of physical body we have.
2. Because God does not have the kind of physical body we have, God cannot be seen as we see physical objects.
3. This fact of the non-physical nature of God has nothing to do with God's existence. That is, simply because God cannot be seen says nothing against the existence of God.
4. Perhaps the question should be stated: how can we know that God exists if we cannot see him? If that is the question then I would respond that it is possible to know that certain things exist even if cannot see them. We know that purely mental objects exist, but we do ot see them physically. Love exists, but we cannot see love. And, philosophically, some mathematicians believe that numbers (which of course cannot be seen) exist as abstract objects.
5. We are also told that one day we shall see God, so God is not in principle unseeable.

So I do not think that the current physical unseeability of God entails that God does not exist. We can, e.g., use the logic of inference to the best explanation and reason that God exists. See my post "Inference to the Best Explanation & the Fine-Tuning Argument."

Will my precocious grade school friend understand any of this? Probably I'd have to sit down with him and try to explain it more in his language!

Conquest of the External World Mitigates Against Conquest of the Soul

If you're reading this,  then comparatively (historically and contemporarily), you are wealthy.
If having money and more and more stuff brought people happiness and contentment, then Americans (and you) should be among the happiest and most content people who have ever lived. But, of course, we are not.

The lesson, thus, is: the answer to a flourishing inner life is not to be found in materialism and consumerism. In fact, David Wells suggests that a flourishing life is in inverse proportion to a life dedicated to acquiring more and more money so as to purchase more and more things. Wells writes:

"The Enlightenment world, which had promised so much, was showing the first symptoms of the postmodern ethos of the West, of that curdling of the soul that would leave the human being replete with goods, smothered in plenty, but totally alone in the cosmos, isolated, alienated, enclosed within itself, and bewildered. The conquest of the world, the triumph of technology, and the omnipresence of shopping malls--our temples to consumption--are not the tools by which the human spirit can be repaired. Of that there should be no doubt now, for if affluence, and the bright, shiny world in which it arises, could be the solvent of all human maladies that lie submerged beneath the surface of life, then this anomie, this bewilderment of soul, would long since have been banished. The truth, in fact, is that the conquest of our external world seems to be in inverse relation to the conquest of our inner world. The more we triumph in the one, the less we seem able to hold together in the other. (In John Piper and Justin Taylor, The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, p. 39)

Conquest of the external world mitigates against conquest of one's soul.

Today's Critic of Hypocrisy Is Tomorrow's Hypocrite

I have never, ever met a person whose deeds totally matched their words. Even the strongest Jesus-followers I have known have had their moments of duplicitousness. And, of course, I have too. I am certain I am more aware of my own hypocrisy more than that of others.

The Jesus-followers that have most influenced me have all been honest about their need for continual transformation. Their salvation was being worked out in fear and trembling. They, like Paul, didn't claim to have "arrived."

These mentors were transparent before me. They pointed me to our need for The Perfect One. They exhibited much grace towards me. I am so grateful (graceful?) for this! Because, if we claim to be without hypocrisy, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. (My loose yet in-the-ballpark translation of 1 John 1:8.)

Enter the critic. Call him X. X has the gift of criticism. X has the genius of finding flaws and inconsistencies in others. With X's gift comes delight, for X loves to identify the hypocrite and paste his face on the tabloid's front page. X stands above and looks down on us. X calls himself a "Christian" and cries "Thank you God, that I am not like the rest of these fakes!" (I'm going to guess that X's father, or mother, or both, were hypocrite-spotting critical hypocrites.)

But all of this is, of course, an offensive disguise created to deflect the attention off X. For X, like us, is a liar and a thief and a cheat and knows it, or at least once knew it before X believed the mask.

Beware the critics, within and without the church, for they are the hypocrites of tomorrow. Yet even they can be rescued, for 1 John immediately adds, if we confess our hypocrisy, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our duplicitousness and purify us from all unrighteousness. (Loose translation #2, of 1 John 1:9.)

Beware perfectionist theology. It errs in making behavior the focus of the Christian life. It isolates. It is an act of unfaith, because too much depends on the self. And, it conceives and labors and gives birth to the hypocrite.