Confronting Canaanites

Right after this conflict with the religious leaders, Jesus runs into a Canaanite woman whose child is demonized. The Canaanites were the worst of the worst according to Jewish history. It almost sounds like Jesus has the same Jewish prejudices and possibly racist attitudes as other Jews of his day in how he responds to this woman. This is an incredibly subversive story because this is the only time recorded in Scripture Jesus loses a debate.

          Jesus tells the woman in Matthew 15:21:24 that he had only come for the lost sheep of Israel. Here comes a very teachable moment for Jesus disciples since this was a common belief even among those who followed after him. This is like a play acted out powerfully to show that Israel is to be a blessing to the whole world and not just an exclusive club for the few.

          Now it gets even worse, Jesus it sounds like calls the woman an pejorative term, a Gentile “dog.” Dogs are not these cute cuddly pets we think of today but they were filthy scavengers in Jesus day. This insult by Jesus seems rude and so out of place for one who has shown so much compassion to other people but he won’t give it to this poor woman and oppressed child. Some may say Jesus is just following the standard beliefs of Jews of his days but when one examines closer the details and outcome of this conversation, it is more possible that Jesus is testing the woman and provoking her towards faith. What better example to destroy false prejudices and heal this woman’s child.

          The remarkable things about Jesus is not only does he commend this woman’s faith in her sly answer to him about even dogs eat the breadcrumbs from the table but Jesus highest praise repeatedly are to outsiders of Israel who show great faith, even Israel’s oppressors, a Roman soldier (Matthew 8:5-13).

        Mark 7:1-13 parallels Matthews story verysimilarly. How Jesus handles his opponents in Mark even gives some insights in how we might today handle our own critics of the faith. The religious leaders asked Jesus by what authority was he doing the things he was doing.? Jesus

said he would only answer their question if they answered his question.  They refused to answer Jesus question so he refused to answer theirs! (Mark 11:27-33).

        It amazes me that our conventional Christian wisdom of the day is so far from Jesus that we can call it "Christian" when it resembles so little of Jesus and the way he lived. We teach our kids to get a good education and fit well into society. In other words, we want our children to be successful. Jesus lived a whole counter cultural lifestyle but we tell our children we want them to fit neatly and safely into society. 

   

     We tell people who have doubts that doubts are bad, ignore them, hide them, and surely, don't talk about them. When John the Baptist doubted who Jesus was, Jesus still commended him for his faith (Matthew 11:1-11).  Doubt unchecked can lead people away from God but doubt explored and challenged can lead to greater faith in Christ.

        Jesus used humor, irony, satire in his teachings but for today's conventional wisdom, this is too impolite, mean-spirited, or just in bad taste. Jesus drank wine but Christians can not. Jesus hung out with all the wrong people and we are told using another Bible axiom, "bad company corrupts good morals." Worse, people we see as opponents to the Christian faith we neither respect nor show them our love but all they get is our contempt. Either they are to be pitied for being so foolish or they are simply a fool who has said in his heart there is no God (Psalm 14:1). Never mine that the fool says with his mouth he believes in God. Never mind that the larger context is about Israel's apostasy where they say one thing with their mouth and their lives tell a different story. This text better applied to the Christian who lives like there is no God rather than the atheist who defines oneself as against God or God's existence.

        Somehow in this world with all it duplicity and conceit, we are supposed to play its power and manipulation games over one another. The world says ‘come out and play’ and Christians are expected to play by the world's rules. Some of us are taking a more ancient path that is neither playing the game at all or changing the rules and then asking the world to play by Jesus kingdom playbook.

        The late Robert Webber in his book "The Younger Evangelicals" wisely told atheists he was not playing the apologetic philosophy game any more when it came to whose arguments are better and who is the smartest person in the room. Webber challenged atheists to play a new game. This game was not about ideas and arguments but stories. Let me tell you a story of God, Israel, Jesus, and the church and how that has shaped the world and you tell me how your story of atheism makes this world a better place?

        Webber comes off too much like Jesus so I am  surprised that it is not atheists but other academic Christian scholars who take Webber to task. "That is not fair or how the game is to be played!" Or as one academic Christian scholar said in an article that Webber is going into retreat and simply refuses to answer legitimate intellectual objections people have to belief. He rightly says that people will probably then not hear your story. But isn't this exactly the point and what happens to Jesus in his encounters? His critics did not want to listen to Jesus, they wanted to make him look bad. The religious leaders did not want to follow Jesus, they wanted to destroy him.

        In the end, how far does a Christian really think he is going to get with a person actually believes that Christianity is the real enemy to life and world peace? How far does the Christian have to go before he or she realizes one is dealing with some people who are not skeptical seekers but hostile antagonists.  How long does it take before Christians wake up to realize that our time may be better spent in quiet discipleship and spiritual disciplines that feeds the soul rather than loud debates and long drawn out arguments that are typically a waist of everyone’s time. 

        I certainly believe Christians have to give answers to questions of faith but sometimes a Christian may need to be more like Jesus and answer a question with a question. And if others refuse to answer our questions, rather than arguing with them, we may be doing them and ourselves a favor to refuse to enter into a whole debate that often makes God's people look bad.

         A very real difference between Christians and skeptics are Christians through the ages have read the Scripture as an icon, image, and full of Christ whereas the atheists and skeptics read it as logic, argument, and a flat one dimensional book. The sad reality is too many believers and unbelievers read the Bible this one dimensional way and then fight violently for the acceptance or rejection of this image of an angry Father who endorses every kind of violence imaginable.

Maybe the ghost that haunts some skeptics is the ghost of a higher love? Atheists who are quick to say they don't believe in God will just as quickly suggest they believe in love. I want to tear down the false idols and illusions of the Christian faith just as much as the atheists do on some issues.

I also want to point them to the real living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and not the small god of the philosophers. I want them to see the glorious truly human-God man of Jesus stripped of all the confusions and modern human projections. I want the atheists to understand that the love they believe in is God because God is love (1 John 4:8).

Is God a Moral Monster?

There has been an enthusiastic rise in secular atheism and its attacks on the God of the Bible. Rather than listening to many of these ex-evangelicals and post-Christians, we have either ignored them or wrote them off as people who don't know what they are talking about. Atheists are simply blind or stupid in their rejection of God. The sad reality is much of what they say is making sense to many young people because the evil and ugly God of the Bible, rather than being repudiated is often affirmed in different ways by Christians.

For example, God likes killing people and is evil in his killing of so many innocent people, especially women and children. Christians often respond that God is God and can kill anyone God wants to because God is God. As humans, we can't kill anyone we want to but God can. As humans and as Christians, we are supposed to love our enemies while God can hate or destroy His enemies. Even worse, our view of the end of the world says God wins in the end where he destroys the earth and saves a few people while condemning the rest of humanity and his good earth to an eternal fiery end of destruction. Is this the really the good news of the gospel?  If the gospel is good news, maybe we need a more beautiful gospel?

Our western culture has been shaped with so many myths like the myth of redemptive violence or our God is a God of peace and war, love and terrible wrath and judgment. What we don't recognize is the many nuances of the Bible where the cosmic evil powers often destroy people lives rather than God.  God is not inflicting the violence but withholds his mercy back while the destructive forces of evil and sin do their devastating work. Warfare language in the Newer Testament is usually spiritual warfare and God's prophets, as well as Jesus tells people to lay down their physical weapons. There is wrath and judgment in the bible but they are wrapped in God's love nature and not some kind of vindictive punisher model where God wants his pound of flesh for every infringement against him.

Can we stop reading the Bible like we did in elementary school? Can we stop reading the Bible like it's a flat book or only has one dimension too it, the literal surface level? I believe the Bible is more powerful and beautiful than the critics say it is and the gospel is more beautiful than most Christians have ever dared to dream.

Can We All Cast Out Our Delusions?

The new Atheists have said things like Christians who believe in God are delusional.  Many Christians and religious people have responded that it's the new atheists that are delusional.  There is a wish on my part that people would quit using this kind of polarizing rhetoric. Despite my concerns, I will say David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies is probably the best book to date in responding to the critics and new atheist movement.

Hart does speak of the new atheists vacuous arguments, historical ignorance, strident self-righteousness, and dreary fundamentalism. This will come off as very dismissive and small minded to some readers who are sympathetic to atheists concerns in regards to religion. But Hart's book is actually a brilliant tour de force of church history and the accomplishments and failures that we learn from that history.  Even though Hart's book does not really tackle the new atheist arguments, he does such an incredible job setting the historical record straight that it does put to bed many of the atheists arguments that religion is bad or God is not good.

Hart rightly says that the new atheists focus is Christendom whereas it should be Christ if you want to hit the mark. The truth is many of the new atheists used to be a part of the Christian faith tradition and even in their moral critique of Christianity, they are still utilizing many of the moral values that came from their post-Christian past. Hart puts into context the way both faith and reason have played a role in medieval history and many of the positive contributions like art, architecture, law, philosophy, and natural science comes from this time what people have tragically described as "the dark ages."

So no, it was not the Christian movement as a whole that was burning down libraries, rejected science, or oppressed all people who believed differently than they did. It has been the church that has prompted people are valuable as God creatures, led the way in building hospitals, libraries, and even promoting the natural sciences whom many of it's great leaders were Christians.  The great scientists through the ages viewed the entire universe as a creation of God governed by laws that God placed within His universe. Materialism is a metaphysical prejudice and the universe is far more open than closed as the New Atheists would have us believe.

Polytheism and secularism as well as religious people have all had their share of violence and abuse throughout history. The story that monotheism is the great evil in our world is simply a historical fiction. What people of little or no faith miss in Christianity is its sheer optimism, joy, and even celebration of life, even in the face of death. The law of charity is seen by all when it comes to natural disasters where Christians are typically the first ones to show up.  Spiritual awakenings and Easter has spurred on people to emancipation and liberty and Jesus who was a slave came to set all slaves free.  Even the pagans in the early church tried to imitate these early Christians benevolence and love and laying down their lives for friends and strangers.

Open Atheism

One of the new understandings between Evangelicals in the past few decades is something called "open theism."  This is the view that God does not know the future completely but lives in the daily now present moment with His creation. These Evangelicals thought classical theism was too closed off in how God relates to His creatures and reality thus the term "Open theism" which means the future has an openness about it.

I have just finished reading Larry Alex Taunton's book The Faith of Christopher Hitchens and just started reading Greg Boyd's The Benefit of Doubt: Breaking the Idol of Certainty. Boyd deals with how doubt from a biblically informed faith can actually help one grow in faith rather than choosing the all or nothing certainty seeking modern model of faith. Christians have always struggled in the faith with doubts but can atheists have doubts too? What is fascinating about Taunton's book is the questions and concerns Christopher Hitchens raises when he is dying of cancer and facing the spectre of death.

Christians typically view the new atheist Christopher Hitchens as a petty mean spirited aggressive atheist.  For hitches, this was his public face but his private more personal demeanor was something quite different behind the scenes. Probably what Hitchens hated the most was hypocrisy and he had no problem calling it out for what it is for all the world to see.  As I read the last encounters of this man through Larry Taunton's lenses, I sensed a love and appreciation for this notorious atheist.  Here was a man with a quick wit, a sharp tongue, but also a human person who was open to change his mind at times when reality hit him hard enough.

Christopher Hitchens went through an enormous change of beliefs after 911 happened. His atheism was still in tact but he saw the reality of evil in man that broke with many of his ideas on Marxist utopianism and modern left views of interpreting evil.  I was reminded of my own spiritual shifting waters where I was theologically in the postmodern camp of the Christian faith and lost my faith in postmodernism after 911. Why 911 did not shake up more people's ideas and faith is beyond me.

Hitchen's most famous books god is not great and How Religion Poisons Everything found this atheist contrarian possessing both Evangelical Christian friends and his secret love towards the King James Bible's poetic prose and the Protestant Reformation revolt against Rome and hierarchal institutional Christianity.  Behind the scenes, Christopher could just as much challenge other atheist platforms as he could religious ones. Hitchens saw a lot of duplicity and lack of authenticity in many Christian leaders and pop culture religious crusaders. Although he could turn a phrase into a weapon to win points in a debate to make god look bad, he gave many critiques of the Christian faith that Christians should learn from in the sad history of the abuse of power of ecclesial authority and the hypocrisy and inconsistences of some of our representatives of the Christian faith.

Maybe the ghost that haunted Christopher Hitchen's was the ghost of a higher love? Atheists who are quick to say they don't believe in God will just as quickly suggest they believe in love.  I want to tear down the false idols and illusions of the Christian faith just as much as the atheists do on some issues.
I also want to point them to the real living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and not the small god of the philosophers.  I want them to see the glorious truly human-God man of Jesus stripped of all the confusions and modern human projections. I want the atheists to understand that the love they believe in is God because God is love.

God's Not Dead 2

I was shocked by how much controversy and anger atheists had over the first movie "God's Not Dead."  I understand the cold apologetics and there are obvious different perceptions and interpretations of movies but there was so much critique of the first movie that was so off based I wondered at times did they actually see the same movie as I did?

I liked the first movie better than the second and Kevin Sorbo did such an excellent portrayal and tremendous acting in the first movie.  This movie I liked as well but it is spotty at times.  There are some great moments in the movie that I liked better than the first movie and then there are several weak and contrived moments.  Can we all be honest and real for a moment.  Does Christianity have to win in the end?  Does winning a court battle actually prove God is not dead?  I thought a better ending to the movie would have been if the Christian teacher would have lost the case and let the viewers ponder that.

Here are a few problems I did have with the film.  Almost every atheist in the movie is portrayed in pretty black and white and in this case, dark terms.  The atheist parents of the girl are uncaring for their daughter and seemed to have moved on quickly from their son's death.  The atheist lawyer and the ACLU are portrayed as people who genuinely hate Christians and want to destroy them.  There is the atheist lawyer who seems virtuous and wants to win the case for the Christian teacher and there are other forms of belief and disbelief and doubts that are shown throughout the movie.

I know we are to chuck our minds and just enjoy a movie but I know too many things in how our legal system really works.  The whole legal proceedings lacked authenticity and credibility in this movie.  What judge would let an attorney turn on his own client that turns out to be a kind of gimmick to win the case?  Then there are numerous Christian apologists who are paraded before the audience to give evidence that Jesus was a real historical person and that one should not try to separate the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith. 

But what was really on trial was the issue of whether this Christian teacher was trying to evangelize her students in her history class.   Like a shell game, the movie gives the impression, if one believes there was a real historical person Jesus, then he should be taught in the public high school like any other historical figure.  The whole bait and switch is for the whole movie to be an evangelism apologetic for the Christian faith.  From a legal standpoint, the movie failed in not really proving its case in a legal sense since it was too busy trying to prove the case for Christ for the watching audience.

I believe Christian persecution is a real issue and there have been teachers and coaches that have lost their jobs over their Christian beliefs and faith in court.  After saying that, how big of a problem in the American church is persecution really happening?  This movie plays on Christian worst fears that some day things are going to get really bad for Christians.  Christians have been thinking this way for centuries and for many, like most fears, never have materialized in a significant way. 

In the future, I wonder if Pureflix or any Christian movie company could make a movie where a Christian and atheist are best friends who show mutual love and respect for each other and maybe die in the end sacrificing themselves for some greater common good.  Now that is a movie I would love to see!

A Matter of Perspective

An Atheist's View On Life

I will live my life according to these beliefs

God does not exist

It is just foolish to think

That there is a God with a cosmic plan

That an all-powerful God brings redemption and healing to the pain and suffering of the world

Is a comforting thought, however

It

Is only wishful thinking

People can do as they please without eternal consequences

The idea that

I am deserving Hell

Because of sin

Is a lie meant to make me a slave to those in power

"The more you have, the happier you will be"

Our existence has no grand meaning or purpose

In a world with no God

There is freedom to be who I want to be

But with God

Everything is fine

It is ridiculous to think

I am lost and in need of saving


A Christian's View on Life
(read this bottom to top)


Author unknown

Contemplating the New Atheism

"Every generation gets the atheism it deserves!" - Michael Hanby

So many of the books and articles against the new atheism have been as pedestrian, patronizing, and dismissive mirroring the same kind of rhetoric the new atheists employ against the religious and Christians.  Maybe the sheer hypocrisy and harsh judgments people have experienced from church people leads us to the out right hostility people see coming from the new atheism?  Sometimes Christianity harshest critics are the very people we need to listen and respond to.  Certainly when it comes to skeptics and people who have been hurt by the church, the church needs to pay attention more and listen to the concerns of her critics.  When it comes to the church's own cultural idolatries, these need to rightly be challenged and discarded.

As I have been studying the church fathers, the concept of mystery (more to come in the next post on this), the apophatic tradition and contemplative Christianity, one needs to first understand that God is not an object or a philosophical idea to study.  God is a person to encounter!  I am reminded of the great contemplative Thomas Merton who once said that "the atheist's experience of God is purely negative whereas the apophatic contemplative is negatively positive."  A real difference between Christians and atheists are Christians read the Scripture as an icon, image, and full of Christ whereas the atheists read it as logic, argument, and a flat book.

Besides the gross lack of discipleship and Christian imagination in many churches, the new world we all find ourselves in privileges the modern narrative of interpreting life through the lens of science that reduces all reality to the explainable and natural as well as having little to no room for mystery and God.  The fragmentation we all face as Christians, skeptics, and atheists effects us all.  Fragmentation, loss of identity, and interpretive pluralism rule our brave new world.  In place of the church, the modern state now competes as the sole place at the table to ensure people's values and security.

In the midst of all this, the church seems to resort to name calling and criticizing the world rather than being the place where the world can find refuge and healing.  What the world needs to see is not more apologists combating atheists but more followers of Jesus turning this world right side up with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Does God Hate Amputees?

"YOU HAVE TO GET THROUGH THE UGLY PLACES TO FIND THE BEAUTIFUL ONES"  -  Rob English

Someone asked Dinesh D'Souza during a discussion by an angry atheist, "What does God have against amputees?"  Why doesn't God heal amputees?  The man asking was not missing any limbs and seemed to have a certain glee about asking the question.  Obviously it's questions like these that atheists like to throw at Christians to trip them up.

Of course in responding to the question, someone might also ask, "If a missing limb is evidence that God hates someone, is a beating heart and well-functioning body evidence that God loves them?"  If evil and suffering are evidences against God, shouldn't goodness and blessings count as evidence for God?

If God is the Creator then all of life is a gift.  If some people have more in life than others or live longer, is that a legitimate cause to complain against the Creator?  If God is more generous to someone else, does that take away the life we now posses?  The truth is, after people recover from injuries, their life and sense of happiness is usually like most other people.  We may demand miracles like for missing limbs to grow back but isn't life itself the great miracle?  To still be captured by God's grace, to be filled with awe and child-like wonder, to fear and be full of a sense of God's presence, now that is a beautiful life.  Jesus taught it would be better to go without some body limb and know God for eternity than to spend eternity apart from God with one's body fully in place.

Wounded Theism and God's Disappearance

"CREATION WAS NOT PREOCCUPIED WITH COUNTING, BUT WITH LOVING, AND THE PRECISION OF LOVE IS NOT THE SAME AS THE PRECISION OF MATHEMATICS" - Carlos Carretto


When atheists rail against God for the injustices of the world and Christians try to defend God with all the bad things they see happening in the world, this is called "theodicy." Most theodicies fall short of truly defending God because people asking questions are coming from different places and need different answers. Human free will may be a good arguement for why bad things happen today, particularly by other people, but it does not adequately explain the pain of a child dying from a rare disease or losing a family in a hurricane. Different situations call for different responses.

I have been reading Dinesh D'Souza's thought provoking book "God Forsaken." Is that you? Do you feel betrayed or forsaken by God? Dinesh comes with a fresh perspective because he has his feet in two worlds. He tries to deal with both the spiritual side and natural side of things but he also deals with them as a person from India who now lives in America. I often find people who inhabit two worlds are deeper theologically and more balanced in making cultural observations.

Some of the most vocal atheists are really angry theists. They are mad or ticked off at God and they are fierce in their focus and attacks on God. Why don't God show himself more? Why did he create a world with so much suffering and pain? If this is the best possible world God can do, I don't want anything to do with God! D'souza makes an interesting argument that for life to exist on earth, we have to have what we see today? Earthquakes and hurricanes happen because of shifting plates for our world to sustain life. Disease and sickness happen because there is an abundance of life trying to survive on this planet. We might as well curse the sun as we curse tsunamis.

Is it also possible that some of our feelings of Godforsakeness is not that God has forsaken us but possibly we have forsaken God? And despite the dangers and tests of this planet, what about its wonders and beauty? What about the times when we walk on this planet and feel like we are both one with nature and one with God? D'Souza points out that God's hiddeness is a form of judgment upon us but I want to go deeper. Is not God's disappearance when we don't sense God's presence and know God's absence, is this not another test to draw us closer to Him? What kind of children would we be if God had to hold our hands every moment? God may of walked with Adam and Eve in the garden but it was when he walked away one day that Adam and Eve both decided to turn their backs on God. We like Israel may feel like we are abandoned and in exile from God. But like Israel, God's love and truth is always pursuing us. God is even portrayed as a wounded lover in the Bible but let us never forget that God's presence and love is always there for us whether we feel it at the moment or not. Without God's love, we truly are Godforsaken.

I Asked For Wonder

SOMETIMES WE WISH THE WORLD COULD CRY
AND TELL US ABOUT THAT WHICH MADE IT
PREGNANT WITH FEAR-FILLING GRANDEUR.

SOMETIMES WE WISH OUR OWN HEART
WOULD SPEAK OF THAT WHICH MADE IT
HEAVEY WITH WONDER

-Abraham Heschel


I used to engage atheists in arguments over the explanatory power of theism versus atheism and arguments that dealt with the existence of God. I have found much of this experience as an exercise in futility. Now my 17 year old son is getting intellectually assaulted by an atheist in several of his classes in High School. He prays, listens, and loves but he does not want to argue.
I'm proud of the faithful presence he is in our public school system which are often breeding grounds for unbelief, profanity, perversity, and the pursuit of every kind of sinful pleasure under the sun.

For people who simply believe that Christianity is an intellectually defensible worldview and if people would only understand the arguments will bring them to the truth of the Christian faith simply misunderstand that life and people often don't work that way. How many circular endless discussions, debates, and fighting rounds must people participate in to find out how fruitless this all is? How many arguments have I heard Christians and atheists use that cuts just as much against their own view as the views of the other! How many "win at any cost" and "take no prisoners" approach by both sides have witnessed the callousness of intellectual elite power plays?

In the early church, the pagans did not yell, "Look at the power of their rational arguments" but "See how they love one another." I simply refuse to play by the rationalist game rules much less in the atheist's playground. Arguments proving God's existence or philosophic sophistry that there is a God out there is not the Living God of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac that I depend my life upon. So when the atheist asks me to talk about philosophy or 'proof's' or 'facts' I simply turn the conversation and ask, 'You tell me the story of athiesm and how it makes for a better world and I will tell you the story of Israel, Jesus, and the church and how that gives life meaning and hope to this world. Most athiests simply opt out of that conversation and that is fine with me too.