Archive for the 'Books' Category

The Other

Published
by
Mike
on October 8, 2008
in Books and friends
. 13 Comments

John William Barry and Neil Countryman, though just fictional characters in David Guterson’s newest novel, The Other, share a couple things in common with me:

First, we all three graduated in 1974 from high school. We “were of the generation that was slightly late for the zeal of the sixties and slightly early for disco. The most popular song, I think, in ‘74 was ‘Takin’ Care of Business’ by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, though the Doobie Brothers were also esteemed. . . . We were seven when JFK was killed, twelve when King was killed, and fourteen when four students were killed at Kent State, but by the time we were old enough to fathom ‘the Zeitgeist’ (a term getting play in ‘74), there was detente, H-bomb drills were quaint, and there was no more draft. . . . Gerald Ford became president in ‘74 and began hitting people with golf balls . . . .”

Second, we all three ran the 880 in high school track. Again, in Countryman’s (Guterson’s) voice: “Ask any track coach. The half-mile is a race for unadulterated masochists. Neither a sprint nor a distance event, it has the worst qualities of both. It’s not a glorious race, either. A lot of people can name a sprinter or two — Carl Lewis, for example — or a famous miler like Roger Bannister, but can very many name even a single half-miler? No athletic romance attaches to the half-mile. It’s not a legendary or even notable feat to beat other runners over 880 yards. At track meets, the half-mile contest is somehow lost between more compelling competitions, an event that unfolds while fans thumb their programs or use the bathroom. Into this gap of a race, this sideshow, step runners in search of a deeper agony than they can find elsewhere. They want to do battle with suffering itself. It’s the trauma they want, the anguished ordeal. It’s the approximately two minutes of self-mortification or private crucifixion. All half-milers have a similar love of pain. So this race is an intimation and an opening. In two minutes’ time, you get a glimpse.”

Guterson’s novel is about a wealthy, tortured young man, John William Barry, who takes up a primitive existence in the wilderness (Think: “Into the Wild,” if you’ve read Jon Krakauer’s book or seen Sean Penn’s movie) to escape all the lies and hypocrisies he sees all around him.

But even more it’s about the devoted friendship of Countryman. The more strange his friend becomes — when it’s clear he’s more of an obsessed, self-focused survivalist than a wilderness hobbyist — the more he thinks about putting the friendship behind him.

I thought these words were powerful: “I left in the morning, and for a month I didn’t go to the cave anymore, or to the trailer on the Hoh, preferring my own life, preferring it unencumbered by any duty to my friend, or by the necessity I’d felt, for three and a half years now, to put up with him. Walking from building to building on campus, or reading at the library on a rainy afternoon, I thought I’d finally let John William slip into the past. Most friendships end with a whimper, not a bang, and I considered letting ours end that way, but this, as it turned out, was a fantasy with no force behind it. There was this loyalty I felt, however strange.”

That’s what moved me as I read this novel. The loyalty. Toward a friend — even as the friend proved to be difficult and strange.

I’ve been blessed with such friends. I’ve been carried and nourished by their loyalty.

What a great blessing!

Bart’s Problems

Published
by
Mike
on February 25, 2008
in Books and faith
. 80 Comments

God is great;
God is good;
Now we thank him
for our food.

And therein is the problem. If God is great (all-powerful) and if he is good, then why does this world so often feel God-forsaken? Why is there such great suffering? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why must infants suffer?

“If there is an all-powerful and loving God in this world, why is there so much excruciating pain and unspeakable suffering?”

This is the question that has haunted Bart Ehrman, a prolific writer and professor of religious studies at UNC, for most of his lifetime.

The result of his quest to answer that question is his newest book, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer, which I read this weekend.

He’s asking the questions I’ve been asking for many years. Those questions have led us in different directions, though.

Ehrman, once a student at Moody Bible institute and at Wheaton College and later a pastor of a Baptist Church while working on his Ph. D. at Princeton in New Testament studies, has decided that the answers for him do not lie in Christianity. “I now have lost [my faith] altogether. I no longer go to church, no longer believe, no longer consider myself a Christian.”

Then he explains, “The subject of this book is the reason why.” He had to finally admit to himself that what he was observing in life didn’t mesh with the claims of faith.

Ok, get ready for this: I like the book. I like it a lot. Maybe it’s not the kind of reading you want to give for May graduation gifts, but it strikes me as an honest journey — though a journey that ends in a very different place from where I am.

First, I appreciate how he honestly observes the pain and suffering in the world — from his personal experiences with suffering to the global agonies. Holocaust. Cancer. Starvation. Infant mortality. Tsunamis. Hurricanes. Diseases. Wars.

He remembers going to a Christmas Eve service during which they prayed for God to break into the darkness again.

Yes, I wanted to affirm this prayer, believe this prayer, commit myself to this prayer. But I couldn’t. The darkness is too deep, the suffering too intense, the divine absence too palpable. During the time that it took for this Christmas Eve service to conclude, more than 700 children in the world would have died of hunger; 250 others from drinking unsafe water; and nearly 300 other people from malaria. Not to mention the ones who had been raped, mutilated, tortured, dismembered, and murdered. Nor the innocent victims caught up in the human trade industry, nor those suffering throughout the world from grinding poverty, the destitute migrant farmworkers in our own country, those who were homeless and inflicted with mental disease. Nor to mention the silent suffering that so many millions of the well-fed and well-tended have to experience daily: the pain of children with birth defects, children killed in car accidents, children senselessly taken by leukemia, the pain of divorce and broken families; the pain of lost jobs, lost income, failed prospects. And where is God?

Sometimes when I’ve talked about suffering with my university students, I get the feeling that many of them — coming, perhaps, from comfortable, relatively pain-free lives — don’t yet get it. Darfur is too far away.

So, yes. I like his honestly. For me, it’s the great losses in my life; but it’s also the overwhelming flood of suffering in the world.

Second, I like his humility. Having read several of his other books, I think it maybe doesn’t come easily for him. (Couldn’t many of us say this about ourselves?) He points out that others who are equally aware and intelligent — including his wife, who is a distinguished prof of medieval English literature at Duke and a devoted Christian in the Episcopal church — come to different conclusions.

Third, I like his survey of how scripture attempts to answer the problems of theodicy, including these:

- The main voice of the Old Testament, which suggests that suffering comes because God is punishing us for being bad. At times, God is a fierce beast who rips his people to shreds for failing him (see Hosea 13 — the “prophet of love”). But does this really explain the suffering that we often see? Does that explain cancer that strikes godly people? How about babies who are perishing because they don’t have access to inexpensive malaria drugs?

- The implications of free will (emphasized in the novel The Shack, which I wrote about recently) — suffering as a collateral damage of the way we treat each other. But does this explain a tsunami? retardation? tornados? And if God SOMETIMES enters in to stop the suffering that might result (e.g., to protect a godly families from a drunk driver), then how do you explain that he doesn’t USUALLY seem to do that? If he EVER intervenes, isn’t that in some ways even more of a problem?

- The view that suffering is ultimately redemptive. “But I just don’t see anything redemptive when Ethiopian babies die of malnutrition, or when thousands of people die today (and yesterday, and the day before) of malaria, or when your entire family is brutalized by a drug-crazed gang that breaks into your home in the middle of the night.”

- The focus of some biblical authors that suffering is a kind of test. Think here of Job or Genesis 22 (God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice Isaac). Side note: his material on Job, and the important questions he asks, was worth the price of the book to me.

- The belief of some of the apocalyptic passages that suffering is caused by forces opposed to God. Ehrman says: “It is also rooted in a blind faith that eventually everything wrong will be made right — a nice thoguht, and one that I wish were true. But it is, at the end of the day, blind faith; and it can lead all too easily to social apathy: since problems won’t be solved until the end, there is no point in our working to solve them now.”

There is one biblical writer that he thinks gets it right: Ecclesiastes. In his reading of that book this means that suffering is mystery, this life is all there is, and that we should seek personal joy and joy for our fellow human beings as we live it.

Maybe you don’t want to read this book. I understand. It’s not for the faint of heart.

It’s called God’s Problem. But, as a believer in the Triune God, I have to ask this: does God really have a problem. Or do I?

So here, I think, are Bart’s Problems. (I say this with great respect for his scholarship. I’ve been blessed by reading several of his books.)

First, he believes that the earliest Christians didn’t understand Jesus of Nazareth to be God himself. Rather, he thinks that was a later development. For good reasons, I disagree. And if you disagree, that makes a lot of different. It does not solve the problem of suffering. I’m still confounded. Still searching. Still upset and flummoxed. But it matters deeply to me that I believe God came among us and suffered with us.

Second, despite his disclaimer in the beginning, it feels at times that he forgets that people with equal intelligence and courage have looked right into the monster of pain and have continued to believe. Even with questions and mystery swirling about them. Remember the story of Dr. Diane Komp? A pediatric oncologist, she actually came to faith in the midst of horrible stories of suffering. It wasn’t charismatic healing that convinced her; it was courageous, faith-filled suffering.

Third, and I know this is just kind of pragmatic, I think he’s advocating a view that won’t work for you when you die. Not after you die — but as you face your mortality. The end stories of unbelievers tend not to be pretty. Something in us insists that there is more. Our souls are, indeed, restless until they rest in him.

My journey to understand continues. I’m so thankful for Bart Ehrman as a conversation partner. If my son winds up doing his residency in North Carolina, perhaps we’ll have a chance to sit down some day and chat about it.

Troubled Waters

Published
by
Mike
on December 19, 2007
in Books
. 79 Comments

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of the scholarship and writing of Ben Witherington. Though his new book Troubled Waters: Rethinking the Theology of Baptism isn’t his best work (IMHO), I did like these words:

“Unfortunately, baptism is one of those contentious issues that pushes us so that we cannot and do not allow the silences in the New Testament text to rest in peace. We fill in the gaps with our own theologies and urgencies, which has led to turning baptism into something it is not: a Christian infant dedication ritual, or a Christian bar mitzvah or confirmation ritual. This result is understandable, because the church today is mainly a nurture organization which has a missionary committee or two. If it were rather a missionary movement that also did nurture, I suspect we would read Acts and the other New Testament evidence quite differently, for what we see in the New Testament reflects the missionary situation, not a settled system of church and sacraments. Most of all, if the New Testament teaches us anything on this subject, it is that we should be prepared for surprises and divine irregularities, and we should accept that Acts tells us that sometimes water baptism comes before, sometimes with, and sometimes after the Spirit has baptized a person into Christ. God can do it how God wants to do it when it comes to salvation. We are playing catch-up ball. And this memo just in: We humans cannot control the liberating grace of God through the sacraments. We are not in charge of such things. We need to stop thinking we are.”

The Beauty of Doing Nothing

Published
by
Mike
on December 18, 2007
in Books
. 13 Comments

See if this rings a bell: “I felt like the soil on some desperate sharecropper’s farm, sorely overworked and needing a fallow season.”

That’s how Elizabeth Gilbert describes herself in Eat, Pray, Love as she heads off to Italy to decompress and recover after a painful divorce.

Here’s what she learned about her former life:

“Generally speaking . . . Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. . . . Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). American’s don’t really know how to do nothing. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype — the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.”

She travels through Italy in what a friend called her “No Carb Left Behind” tour, trying to explore the meaning of the phrase Il bel far niente: “the beauty of doing nothing.”

I wonder if we’re getting close to the idea of Sabbath. Rest. Reflection. Enjoyment. Prayer. Re-centering.

- - - -

Don’t miss Larry James’s wonderful words about his father, who died Sunday night.

The Cruciform Church

Published
by
Mike
on September 25, 2007
in Books, Church of Christ and movies
. 32 Comments

Have you seen the movie “Jesus Camp?” Scary! It’s worth watching. Would be good for us to talk about as we seek to think through our identity as people of God.

- - - -

Here’s my foreword to the new edition of Leonard Allen’s The Cruciform Church:


The Cruciform Church is one of the most formative books of my Christian life. It’s a pleasure to write a foreword for this new edition. In some ways I feel like I’ve written many forewords over the past sixteen years (since it was first published) as I’ve encouraged many young ministers and university students to read it.

When I first read the book, it felt like Leonard Allen had just flipped through the photo albums of my spiritual family, guiding me, enlightening me, and encouraging me. He provided just what I needed: deep appreciation for the strengths of this heritage but honest description and evaluation of ways in which the “movement” got off course.

So helpful was it that I’ve been known to tell people that in my humble opinion it’s the most important book written about Christian faith and discipleship from within Churches of Christ in my lifetime.

Thanks to Leonard’s book, the word “cruciform” entered the central vocabulary in Churches of Christ. He helped us see that the death of Jesus is so much more than just the sacrifice for our sins (though, thank God, it certainly is that!). The cross of Jesus is the claiming of a new creation; it is the reconciling of all things to God; and it is the Jesus-style of living, the laying down of one’s life for the world.

In his original preface, Leonard said that some encouraged him to omit the word “cruciform” because it was too unfamiliar. But he kept it, he wrote, “in hope that this image might become the dominant image by which Churches of Christ speak of identifying the New Testament Church.”

Though sixteen years have passed, The Cruciform Church is, if anything, even more relevant today. We live in a consumeristic society – an environment that has spilled over into Western churches. We are constantly tempted to be providers of goods and services to draw the already-convinced rather than outposts for the mission of Christ.

The word I hear a lot now to describe the need to lean against this consumerism is “missional.” We are called to participate in the rule of Christ as his hands, his feet, and his voices in this world. We are to remember that we’ve been blessed to be a blessing to others. This powerful book really anticipated that perspective, calling on the church to be cross-shaped in its identity and mission.

We also need to hear again Leonard’s call to live as aliens in this world, remembering that our citizenship is in heaven. Too many Christ-followers are filled with anger, feeling snubbed by the world for not receiving privileged treatments. But we follow one who for the joy before him endured the cross (Heb. 12:1-3).

On a personal note, I write from a very different place now than I would have in 1990. At that time Leonard Allen was a respected professor and author—a scholar in every since—whom I didn’t know well. Since then he’s become my teacher, my spiritual guide, a member of the church where I preach, and, most importantly, my friend. I knew long ago the wisdom that came from his head; I now know that it comes from his heart.

Out of the Limelight

Published
by
Mike
on August 21, 2007
in Books and Church
. 26 Comments

I’ve just finished a quarter century of preaching. We moved to North Carolina in May of 1982 . . . to Arkansas in September of 1984 . . . and to Texas in August of 1991.

Most of those years I’ve been in pretty visible pulpits — the College Church in Searcy and Highland.

But there was a real joy in that first ministry, too. It was off the beaten path. I preached to 140 wonderful people on the coast of NC.

And today I’m thinking of the many faithful people who serve as ministers (preachers, youth ministers, campus ministers, children’s ministers, etc.) in places that most never hear about. Rarely are they invited to speak at lectureships. No one is going to them asking them to write a book.

And yet month after month, year after year, and (sometimes) decade after decade they continue to minister faithfully.

For many of them, there is no multiple staff to share responsibilities with. There is not much time away. But there is still great joy.

Large churches grab most of the headlines. But small churches — places of deep fellowship and vibrant mission — are just as vital.

This morning I’m giving thanks for the many faithful ministers (I know, I know — we’re all ministers — but you know what I mean) scattered in these important places.

- - - -

Luke Timothy Johnson takes on the diversity of the gospel testimonies about Jesus. What do we do once we recognize it?

One option is to pretend the diversity isn’t there, attempting to collapse all the voices into one harmonized gospel.

Another option is to see only the diversity so that you’re unable to read all the witnesses as reliable.

But there is another possibility:

“Or will [those who notice the diversity] recognize that each of the compositions — human interpretations of a person whose life, death, and resurrection far exceeded the normal categories of human experience — has genuine value as testimony to some particular facet of Jesus, but none of them alone (nor all of them together) adequately or comprehensively captures the living reality that is Jesus?

“I choose the last option. I approach these writings as thoroughly human in their composition — and therefore necessarily limited in the ways all human writings are limited — but also as inspired by the Holy Spirit of Jesus himself — and therefore able to speak truly within their limited perspective and comprehension. I assume that none of these writings tell us everything that we would like to know . . . but that each of them individually speaks truly as it is able and all of them taken together speak reliably concerning the person in whose name they were written. I make no apology for this decision, and I gladly recognize that it is a decision based upon a prior conviction of faith. But if I did not start from such a faith, it is difficult to understand why I would be seeking to learn Jesus in this personal fashion anyway.” (Living Jesus, 79f)

Irresistible Revolution . . . The Kite Runner

Published
by
Mike
on August 10, 2007
in Books
. 43 Comments

Want to know why so many university students are addicted to Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution?

Here’s a snippet:

I know there are people out there who say, “My life was such a mess. I was drinking, partying, sleeping around . . . and then I met Jesus and my whole life came together.” God bless those people. But me, I had it together. I used to be cool. And then I met Jesus and he wrecked my life. The more I read the gospel, the more it messed me up, turning everything I believed in, valued, and hoped for upside-down.

How about this:

I once heard a pastor say, “The church is like Noah’s ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you’ll drown.”

- - - -

Thanks so much to those of you who suggested I read The Kite Runner. It is heart-breaking, inspiring — and so well written. Can’t wait to get my hands on Khaled Hosseini’s next book. (Is it just as good?)

The Barbarian Way

Published
by
Mike
on July 31, 2007
in Books
. 25 Comments

“Somewhere along the way the movement of Jesus Christ became civilized as Christianity. We created a religion using the name of Jesus Christ and convinced ourselves that God’s optimal desire for our lives was to insulate us in a spiritual bubble where we risk nothing, sacrifice nothing, lose nothing, worry about nothing. Yet Jesus’ death wasn’t to free us from dying, but to free us from the fear of death. Jesus came to liberate us so that we could die up front and then live. Jesus Christ wants to take us to places where only dead men and women can go.” - Erwin Mcmanus

Leaving Church #2

Published
by
Mike
on July 24, 2007
in Books, Church and faith
. 23 Comments

A few more quotes from Barbara Brown Taylor:

“At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.”

“Having tried as hard as I knew how to seek and serve Christ in all persons, I knew for sure that I could not do it. I was not even sure that I wanted to do it anymore, and I felt increasingly deceitful saying that I would. Feeding people was no longer feeding me. While I remained constitutionally incapable of walking past a hungry baby bird, it was the wild geese that were calling me. When I heard them coming, I hurried to the window, straining to see them through the branches of the tall pines overhead. Sometimes all I caught was a beating wing or an outstretched neck, but even that was enough to set me weeping again. No thoughts went with the tears. The tears simply fell out of my eyes, and it was not until the geese were gone that the words formed in the empty air. Take me with you.”

“After I left him in search of food [at a pool party], I wound up with a couple I had always thought I would enjoy but whom I never really got to know since they did not serve on any committees and were never, as far as I knew, in crisis. We sat down in adjacent rocking chairs with plates full of lobster and corn balanced on our laps, laughing so much that I spit food clear across the porch. I did not wonder why I had not sought them out earlier because I already knew the answer. By my rules, caring for troubled people always took precedence over enjoying delightful people, and the line of troubled people never ended. Sitting there with corn stuck between my teeth, I wondered why I had not changed that rule sooner.”

Leaving Church

Published
by
Mike
on July 23, 2007
in Books, Church and faith
. 24 Comments

Some poignant words from Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith. Words of faith . . . and of congregational joy and pain . . . and of accepting a call to minister . . . and of deciding it was time to leave ministry.

These words sink deep.

“The call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human.”

“I guess you could say that my losses have been chiefly in the area of faith, and specifically in the area of being certain who God is, what God wants of me, and what it means to be Christian in a world where religion often seems to do more harm than good.”

“On the subject of divine guidance I side with Susan B. Anthony. ‘I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,’ she once said, ‘because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.’ Having been somewhat of an expert on the sanctification of my own desires, I try not to pin them on God anymore. At the same time, I recognize the enormous energy in them, which strikes me as something that God might be able to use.”

“As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother’s arms. The Divine Presence was strongest outdoors, and most palpable when I was alone.”

“As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”

“I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them. If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape.”

“Once I had begun crying on a regular basis, I realized just how little interest I had in defending Christian beliefs. The parts of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church were not the believing parts but the beholding parts. ‘Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy . . .’ ‘Behold the Lamb of God . . .’ ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock . . .”

“The easiest thing was to tell [her friends who asked why she resigned from ministry] that I had always wanted to teach college, which was true, but behind the answer lay truths harder to confess. My quest to serve God in the church had exhausted my spiritual savings. My dedication to being good had cost me a fortune in being whole. My desire to do all things well had kept me from doing the one thing within my power to do, which was to discover what it meant to be fully human.”

“With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.”

“Once, when I attended a workshop on teaching religion, a presenter talked about how he took his students on wilderness trips to give them a taste of life nearer the edge. Whether they went hiking or white-water rafting, the point was to step outside their high-carb comfort zones long enough to encounter the untamed holiness of the wild. ‘Excuse me,’ a member of the audience said, ‘but are there predators in those places who are above you on the food chain?’ ‘Well, of course not,’ the presenter said. ‘I wouldn’t put students in danger like that.’ ‘I wouldn’t either,’ the man in the audience said, ‘but don’t lull them into thinking that they have experienced true wilderness. It’s only wilderness if there’s something out there that can eat you.’”