Archive for the 'faith' Category

Christian Evidences

Published
by
Mike
on January 15, 2007
in Books and faith
. 92 Comments

If I was going to argue the position of atheism, I’d argue about like Sam Harris did. I’d speak about these things:

1. A sense that something is very wrong with this world — something that is hard to mesh with a believe in a loving, all-powerful God. I’d ask why this God doesn’t protect his people better. (How hard would it be to keep an SUV full of teenagers who are returning from a youth rally from turning over on I-20? How difficult would it be to answer the prayer of thousands of believers asking for a 5-year-old with cancer to be healed?)

2. A conviction that the personal testimonies aren’t enough. The same testimonies to healing, answered prayer, and changed lives have come from Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, etc. People who believe dramatically different things have offered witness to the amazing things they’ve seen their God do.

3. An observation that people have continued to be willing to kill each other over their holy books. Partly, this is saying that the faith doesn’t seem to “work.” While we might say that’s just talking about the inconsistencies of the people of faith rather than of the faith itself, Jesus said, “By your love they will know you’re my disciples.” Apparently, if they live with grudges, bitterness, and murderous intent, it’s fair enough to assume they’re not Jesus’ disciples.

4. A feeling that the holy books of the various religions have serious problems. Each religion finds serious flaws in the holy books of the other religions. Few are able to back off and say that they all are problematic. (E.g., just pointing out that the OT has a higher moral than, say, the Babylonians, doesn’t really answer all the questions about killing teens who talk back and about taking women as personal spoils of war.)

All right, you may be wondering. Has Mike converted?

Nope. But I’ve always had a deep appreciation for serious struggles of faith. Several people introduced me to an approach to Christian evidences of the EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT variety when I was in college. Shortly after I graduated, I started a Bible study with university students at UNC-Wilmington who were searching for faith. It quickly became clear that the EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT perspective only demands a verdict if you already believe. (There is, of course, some value to that.)

First, let me mention a couple books I read over the holidays that I think help us think through Christian apologetics in our current world context. One is Greg Boyd’s Letters From a Skeptic. The book contains a series of letters that Boyd exchanged with his father, Edward Boyd, who was an unbeliever.

In the preface Greg Boyd writes: “Exceptionally intelligent, intensely skeptical, very strong-willed, and 70 years old — could a more unlikely candidate for conversion be found than my father? He had given me little grounds for hope.”

The letters from the dad ask the good, tough questions; the letters from the son are honest and hopeful.

The last letter in the book says:

Dear Greg:

Well, as I told you over the phone, I finally “took the leap.” Hallelujah! As I sit here and read over all of our correspondence, I still can’t believe how I’ve changed from a smart-ass-know-it-all to an actual believer! Jeanne can’t believe it either! It’s probably even confused the hell out of our dog! The angels whom you say rejoice over this sort of thing are probably giving each other high-fives! . . .

As you know, I’ve still got a number of questions, and I’m sure we’ll continue to hash these out. But my disposition has completely changed. I’m asking them no longer as a skeptic, but as a believer. You don’t need to end your letters “with hope” any longer. . . .

Lots of love, with faith (!)

Dad

The other book is Alister McGrath’s brief (123 pages) Glimpsing the Face of God: The Search for Meaning in the Universe. It’s the kind of book that I’d be glad to put in the hands of those university students whose rental house I met in weekly so many years ago.

Here are a couple of my conclusions about Christian evidences:

1. My central arguments for faith aren’t cosmological (”nothing comes from nothing”), teleiological (”there’s an intricately designed watch, so there must be a watch-maker”), moral (”why does everyone agree that Hitler was evil?”), or ontological (”I can imagine that there is a God . . . so there must be a God”). I begin as a Christ-follower. I am a believer in the story of Jesus Christ. That’s where I begin. I believe because I have committed myself to this one who came from God “to put the world to rights” (as N. T. Wright would say it). So I’m inviting others to consider that possibility with me. My opening move is one of story. Within the consideration of that story, the other traditional Christian evidences find their value.

2. The whole EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT doesn’t ring true for many seekers. If there were evidence that DEMANDS a decision, they’d already believe. Some are dishonest, of course, but many are not. Many are genuine truth-seekers. I prefer to speak about clues. There are footprints in the sand. We’re trying to figure out the story behind those footprints.

“What if nature is studded with clues to our true meaning and destiny, and fingerprinted with the presence of God? This book is an exploration of this fascinating possibility.” (McGrath)

Someone asked in my last post how I could question Harris’s statement that atheism is “simply an admission of the obvious.” And the reason is because you can’t prove faith in atheism. There is no scientific discovery that can conclude definitively that there is no God. The man who was a primary driver in the Genome Project is himself a devoted believer!

Again, from McGrath: “There has never been any shortage of people who will tell us that the evidence is totally persuasive, and that — unless we are complete fools — we will accept that there is no meaning in life, and no God behind this world. Some argue that atheism is the only logically and scientifically respectable worldview. Yet this overlooks the inconvenient fact that the truth claims of atheism simply cannot be proved. How do we know that there is no God? The simple fact of the matter is that atheism is a faith, which draws conclusions that go beyond the available evidence.”

Finally, today, these words from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

Letter to a Christian Nation

Published
by
Mike
on January 11, 2007
in Books and faith
. 100 Comments

I know this seems strange, but over the break I’ve been doing some reading of works by atheists. I’m not in the market for conversion. But I also want to hear what’s being said.

There are some resources online, such as “Why Does God Hate Amputees?” There are even videos on YouTube such as this one or this one.

Again, I think it’s obvious that I’m not in agreement with what’s said. But in order to “give a reason for the hope that’s in us,” we need to know what unbelievers are saying. Scripture recognized long ago that the big battle isn’t against atheism but against idolatry (reducing God by trying to find life in someone or something other than God). But still, I’ve wanted to know what voices are out there, rather than just assuming some stereotype.

Last year I read Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, and over the break I added the much shorter Letter to a Christian Nation.

Harris begins by talking about the irony of the Christian assumption that their faith is primarily about love and forgiveness.

“The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ’s love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism. While we may want to ascribe this to human nature, it is clear that such hatred draws considerable support from the Bible. How do I know this? The most disturbed of my correspondents [since the release of The End of Faith] always cite chapter and verse.”

He opens with this honest declaration: “Either the Bible is just an ordinary book, written by mortals, or it isn’t. Either Christ was divine, or he was not. . . . So let us be honest with ourselves: in the fullness of time, one side is really going to win this argument, and the other side is really going to lose.” (I’m reminded here of Pascal’s famous “wager argument”!)

Here is a frontal blow from Harris as he considers how nations of the world are willing to kill each other over their holy books and their confident interpretations:

“The idea that the Bible is a perfect guide to morality is simply astounding, given the contents of the book. Admittedly, God’s counsel to parents is straightforward; whenever children get out of line, we should beat them with a rod (Proverbs 13:24, 20:30, and 23:13-14). If they are shameless enough to talk back to us, we should kill them (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21, Mark 7:9-13, and Matthew 15:4-7). We must also stone people to death for heresy, adultery, homosexuality, working on the Sabbath, worshipping graven images, practicing sorcery, and a wide variety of other imaginary crimes.”

What about Christianity — as set out in the New Testament?

“If you think that Christianity is the most direct and undefiled expression of love and compassion the world has ever seen, you do not know much about the world’s other religions. Take the religion of Jainism as one example. The Jains preach a doctrine of utter nonviolence. While the Jains believe many improbable things about the universe, they do not believe the sorts of things that lit the fires of the Inquisition. You probably think the Inquisition was a perversion of the ‘true’ spirit of Christianity. Perhaps it was. The problem, however, is that the teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. You are, of course, free to interpret the Bible differently — though isn’t it amazing that you have succeeded in discerning the true teachings of Christianity, while the most influential thinkers in the history of your faith failed?”

Harris is aghast at the way Christians talk about morality — usually about sex — while ignoring the relationship to suffering.

“Relieving suffering seems to rank rather low on your list of priorities. Your principal concern appears to be that the creator of the universe will take offense at something people do while naked. This prudery of yours contributes daily to the surplus of human misery. . . We now have a vaccine for HPV that appears to be safe and effective [in battling cervical cancer]. The vaccine produced 100 percent immunity in the six thousand women who received it as part of a clinical trial. And yet, Christian conservatives in our government have resisted a vaccination program on the grounds that HPV is a valuable impediment to premarital sex. These pious men and women want to preserve cervical cancer as an incentive toward abstinence, even if it sacrifices the lives of thousands of women each year.”

“Kids who are taught abstinence alone are less likely to use contraceptives when they do have sex, as many of them inevitably will. One study found taht teen ‘virginity pledges’ postpone intercourse for eighteen months on average — while, in the meantime, these virgin teens were more likely than their peers to engage in oral and anal sex. American teenagers engage in about as much sex as teenagers in the rest of the developed world, but American girls are four to five times more likely to become pregnant, to have a baby, or to get an abortion. Young Americans are also far more likely to be infected by HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. The rate of gonorrhea among American teens is seventy times higher than it is among their peers in the Netherlands and France. The fact that 30 percent of our sex-education programs teach abstinence only (at a cost of more than $200 million a year) surely has something to do with this. The problem is that Christians like yourself are not principally concerned about teen pregnancy and the spread of disease. That is, you are not worried about the suffering caused by sex; you are worried about sex.”

He scoffs at the idea that God answers our prayers:

“While many people of faith seem convinced that prayer can heal a wide variety of illnesses (despite what the best scientific research indicates), it is curious that prayer is only ever believed to work for illnesses and injuries that can be self-limiting. No one, for instance, ever seriously expects that prayer will cause an amputee to regrow a missing limb. Why not? Salamanders manage this routinely, presumably without prayer. If God answers prayer — ever — why wouldn’t he occasionally heal a deserving amputee? And why wouldn’t people of faith expect prayer to work in such cases?”

And he’s unmoved by personal testimonies about changes that have come into people’s lives:

“I have no doubt that your acceptance of Christ coincided with some very positive changes in your life. Perhaps you now love other people in a way that you never imagined possible. You may even experience feelings of bliss while praying. I do not wish to denigrate any of these experiences. I would point out, however, that billions of other human beings, in every time and place, have had similar experiences — but they had them while thinking about Krishna, or Allah, or the Buddha, while making art or music, or while contemplating the beauty of Nature.”

Well, there’s so much I’d like to say in response. When he says that “atheism is not a philosophy . . . it is simply an admission of the obvious,” I think he’s self-deceived. Isn’t that like an overly-confident declaration of being opposed to over-confidence? And when he’s utterly amazed that “80 percent of Katrina’s survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God,” perhaps he should ask if there is more going on in this world than a scientist can test and a rationalist can figure out.

Why does faith flourish in pediatric oncology wings of hospitals? (It’s the question that led Dr. Diane Komp, a pediatric oncologist, back to faith.)

But having said that, I think Harris has done us a favor by writing honestly and clearly about what faith looks like from his perspective. He has pointed out some things that we must face if we’re going to have a voice in this world. I’d love to be in a study group with a bunch of university students working through this. I trust that our faith is not too fragile to face such arguments with compassion and truth.

Evangelism or “Social Gospel”?

Published
by
Mike
on January 3, 2007
in Salt and Light, faith and missional
. 22 Comments

From, of course, N. T. Wright:

“For generations the church has been polarized between those who see the main task being the saving of souls for heaven and the nurturing of those souls through the valley of this dark world, on the one hand, and on the other hand those who see the task of improving the lot of human beings and the world, rescuing the poor from their misery.

“The longer that I’ve gone on as a New Testament scholar and wrestled with what the early Christians were actually talking about, the more it’s been borne in on me that that distinction is one that we modern Westerners bring to the text rather than finding in the text. Because the great emphasis in the New Testament is that the gospel is not how to escape the world; the gospel is that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. And that his death and Resurrection transform the world, and that transformation can happen to you. You, in turn, can be part of the transforming work. That draws together what we traditionally called evangelism, bringing people to the point where they come to know God in Christ for themselves, with working for God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. That has always been at the heart of the Lord’s Prayer, and how we’ve managed for years to say the Lord’s Prayer without realizing that Jesus really meant it is very curious.

(from an interview in Christianity Today, 1/07)

Baptism Pictures

Published
by
Mike
on December 11, 2006
in faith and family
. 19 Comments

Chris 1

Chris 1

A Night We’ll Always Remember

Published
by
Mike
on December 11, 2006
in faith and family
. 34 Comments

The last words I heard last night before falling asleep were these: “Dad, I want you to put my baptism on my ipod.”

July 25, 1996 and December 10, 2006 are days Diane and I will always remember. Those are the days we baptized our boys. Both were about fourteen-and-a-half when we baptized them.

Chris had planned last night carefully. After Steven Curtis Chapman’s song “Dive,” the DVD clip “I Believe” (Igniter #3), a scripture reading (Colossians 3:12-17), and a prayer, three letters were read to him (this part he didn’t know about): one from Josh Ross, one from Jenna, and one from Matt. They were the kind of letters that bless you all the way to your bones.

Then Diane spoke wonderful words to him, encouraging him to trust in the Lord with all his heart, leaning not on his own understanding (Prov. 3).

I told him that his journey of faith has been more like the opening of a flower than the sting of a bee. Many conversions are like the sting: they happen suddenly and you know exactly when. Most of the passages about conversion in the New Testament echo that language because people were turning from darkness to light, from paganism to Christianity. But that language doesn’t entirely fit his experience. He has been a person a faith from the very beginning. We’d seen his character forged in the midst of challenges: his sister died when he was two, he almost died in a wreck a decade later; he lost a first cousin, and then he lost a friend (in the accident). God has been forming him into a person of incredible kindness and compassion toward all people.

So for Chris, the darkness-to-light language doesn’t really fit. He’s been on a journey — a journey for which baptism is an important marker. It is a stake in the ground for him to declare, “This isn’t just my mother’s faith . . . or my father’s faith . . . or my brother’s faith. This is what I believe.” It is an acceptance of the challenge of Colossians 3:17: that whatever he does in word or deed, he’s to do it all in the name of the Lord. It is a public acceptance and welcoming of the mission of Christ.

Then we baptized him in front of some of the important people in his life. (I’ll add a picture later.) Some of those there are on his basketball team at Lincoln. Some are friends he’s known since they were in the nursery together at Highland. Others are people who’ve been teachers, coaches, almost-parents, covenant group members, etc.

So last night he told me he wants it on his ipod. He wants me to rip the DVD onto my Powerbook and then put it on his iPod. (Yes, he has the nicest one in the family — a video iPod. There really isn’t much video on there. Highlights of Texas’s national championship. A few other things. Now his baptism.)

After the baptism, we went to the gym for pizza, soda, cookies, and balls flying everywhere.

That’s a night to remember.

- - - -

This from my friend, Mark Moore:

I’m about to help you out here with an amazing idea for your Christmas shopping. You know that nagging problem of what to get for the person who has everything? Well, this should solve that one. I bet they don’t have their very own tree in Uganda. Click on the link below and you can buy one, get a cool Christmas card you can plant (yes, a card you can plant when you are done) and it will grow flowers (no kidding) and you get an ornament that will have a number on it marking the GPS coordinates of your tree in Uganda. (Better click on the link below if you want it to make sense.) The Kibo Group is a non-profit that I run along with a friend named Clint Davis. You can read about Kibo at our website www.kibogroup.org. We make no money off this, (Kibo has no salaries for stateside employees)…the money goes to plant trees. Check it out… its a pretty unique gift idea and it really can make the world better.
Merry Christmas!

End Things

Published
by
Mike
on October 17, 2006
in faith and scripture
. 58 Comments

Yesterday was a wild day in class as students cut loose asking questions about “end things”:

1. Is hell literal, eternal punishment (500 billion centuries as a brief beginning of punishment for not knowing about Jesus) . . . or is it a figurative way of describing the end/destruction of that which is evil (annihilation)? . . . or is it possible that God’s moving everyone/everything toward redemption?

2. Is heaven “up there” or “down here”? I.e., will God wipe this earth out of existence?

3. Is someone dead just dead . . . or is only their body dead while their spirit is still alive? (In other words, what is the meaning of resurrection?)

4. Is there such a thing as a rapture? Will there be a literal battle of Armaggedon?

5. Will we know people in heaven? Will we be in relationship with them?

The only part of the discussion I didn’t particularly like was the question one student asked in the middle, “Will we need to know all this for the test?” No teacher likes that question because it sounds like, “Do I have to pay attention to this?” But, giving students the benefit of the doubt, maybe it just means, “Do I need to write all this down, or can I just lay my pen down, listen closely, and learn?” (Let’s assume the latter.)

I know, I know: you’re wanting to know what I said in regard to all these questions. Maybe later.

“What Shall It Profit a Man . . .”

Published
by
Mike
on October 12, 2006
in faith
. 28 Comments

Yesterday, the text of Mark’s gospel that I was teaching included these words: “What good is it for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul?”

I remember even as a teenager being impressed with those words. They’re underlined in my old red-letter KJV.

The disciples are looking for a Messiah with power. In their wildest dreams, they’ve never connected the Messiah with the Suffering Servant. Those had to be two different people.

But they’re not. The Messiah came not in worldly power; rather, he came as the Suffering One.

Some are delighted by that and take up the cross to follow him. Others are offended and either reject him or give him a makeover.

He was not what the disciples expected. He is not what many want. But this Suffering Messiah told us the truth: that we can spend all our lives focused on ourselves . . . or we can join him in the healing of the broken world.

Does God Want You to Be Rich?

Published
by
Mike
on September 21, 2006
in faith and justice
. 123 Comments

I hope you got a chance to read the excellent, balanced cover story in Time Magazine entitled “Does God Want You to Be Rich?” The cover description says: “Yes, say some megachurches. Others call it heresy. The debate over the new gospel of wealth.”

Seriously — how did the Evangelical church get here?

The basic movement of the gospel is clear (Phil. 2:5ff): self-denial and self-sacrifice rather than self-fulfillment. We follow one who had no place to lay his head, who warned us that life does not consist in the abundance of things, who told a wealthy man to sell all and give to the poor, who insisted that we cannot have two masters (God and $$). Followers of Christ in other cultures have often lost all as a result of their faithfulness to him.

But walk into Christian bookstores and there is a different gospel. The gospel of Joel Osteen.

And does it sell! Your Best Life Now has sold over 4 million copies. It finds a welcome audience in the consumerism of America.

The authors of the article write:

“What remains is a materialism framed in a kind of Tony Robbins positivism. No one exemplifies this better than Osteen, who ran his father’s television-production department until John died in 1999. ‘Joel has learned from his dad, but he has toned it back and tapped into basic, everday folks’ ways of talking,’ says Ben Phillips, a theology professor at the Soutwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. That language is reflected in Your Best Life Now, an extraordinarily accessible exhortation to this-world empowerment through God. ‘To live your best life now,’ it opens, to see ‘your business taking off. See your marriage restored. See your family prospering. See your dreams come to pass . . .’ you must ’start looking through the eyes of faith.’ Jesus is front and center but not his Crucifixion, Resurrection or Atonement.”

Does that tell us something?

The book is full of “illustrations of how the Prosperity doctrine has produced personal gain, most memorably, perhaps, for the Osteen family: how Victoria’s ’speaking words of faith and victory’ eventually brought the couple their dream house; how Joel discerned God’s favor in being bumped from economy to business class.”

Insightfully, the authors go on to talk about the basic for criticism of this Prosperity Lite movement: “Most unnerving for Osteen’s critics is the suspicion that they are fighting not just one idiosyncratic misreading of the gospel but something more daunting: the latest lurch in Protestantism’s ongoing descent into full-blown American materialism.”

Rick Warren, who by his words and life is becoming an incredible leader in the worldwide church, said: “This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? Baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worthy by your net worth.”

Ron Sider, author of Rich Christians in a Hungry World: “They have neglected the texts about the danger of riches. Prosperity Gospel Lite is one of the most powerful forms of neglect of the poor.”

And Ben Witherington, an incredible Evangelical New Testament scholar at Asbury Seminary: “We need to renounce the false gospel of wealth and health — it is a disease of our American culture: it is not a solution or answer to life’s problems.”

The “internet monk” (Michael Spencer) has written:

“He’s being sold to us by people who want to make money off his success, and they are counting on us to be sheep, ‘baaing’ quietly, but going along to the slaughter. Any analysis of Joel Osteen’s theology is going to have a hard time saying he is proclaiming the Christian message. The most popular preacher in Christianity is proclaiming a theology that is neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim, but is pragmatically pagan. Pagan in the sense of finding ways to gain the favor of god so he will do good things for you. Manipulating the deity to give you blessings. This is the ultimate example of Luther’s ‘theology of glory’ chosen over the ‘theology of the cross.’ I would rather a non-Christian hear John Shelby Spong a hundred times than hear this. Spong denies it all- outright. Osteen is presented as a Christian, but his message isn’t going to bring you to Christ, the Kingdom or heaven. It’s spiritual cyanide disguised as candy. If there is a hell, Osteen’s message won’t stop you or the people you love from going there, because the savior in his messages is YOU and the salvation he offers is a NEW ATTITUDE, and some resulting real estate. The question becomes, will evangelicals do anything? Will they say anything? Will they register their objections to Osteen’s reshaping of the Reformation gospel into a positive thinking message that makes Robert Schuller look like John Calvin in comparison?”

Yesterday I listened to Dan McVey talk about the advancement of Islam in North America. It is the fastest-growing religion in North America. (On a global scale, protestant Christianity is by far the fastest growing religion, however. It outpaces Islam in growth by 3-1, I believe Dan said.) In this culture of ease and consumerism, Islam offers a faith of discipline and serious devotion. Of course, Christianity does too (along with a framework of grace and a God who has come near in Christ) — just not in the versions that have become so popular in “Christian” bookstores.

Putt-Putt Christians

Published
by
Mike
on September 8, 2006
in Books, faith and spiritual formation
. 44 Comments

From Dallas Willard’s The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship:

“For at least several decades the churches of the Western world have not made discipleship a condition of being a Christian. One is not required to be, or to intend to be, a disciple in order to become a Christian, and one may remain a Christian without any signs of progress toward or in discipleship. Contemporary American churches in particular do not require following Christ in his example, spirit, and teachings as a condition of membership — either of entering into or continuing in fellowship of a denominationn or local church. I would be glad to learn of any exception to this claim, but it would only serve to highlight its general validity and make the general rule more glaring. So far as the visible Christian institutions of our day are concerned, discipleship clearly is optional.”

Cornelius Plantinga has an insightful piece in the latest CT entitled “Dr. Willard’s Diagnosis: Why We Need to Really Die Before We Can Really Live.” It’s about Dallas Willard’s “mighty project” to encourage the church to take transformation seriously, to read the Sermon on the Mount as the way he really expects us to live (modern circumstances not withstanding).

Plantinga writes:

“According to Willard, the problem is that a lot of us nod amiably at these instructions for a big Christian life in God’s kingdom. Then we ignore them . . . .

“Dr. Willard’s diagnosis: A lot of us are doing Christianity at a putt-putt level. We want to be forgiven without following Jesus.

“We’re afraid to follow Jesus, because then we’d have to die and rise with him. . . . The truth is, we’re mildly attracted to his virtues, but we’re strongly attracted to our vices. We wouldn’t like to lose them because they please us, and the prospect of a significant life with Jesus doesn’t so much. Do we expect a new Christian life will just happen without our having to make inconvenient changes in how we live Monday to Sunday? If so, we are like people who want to be solvent and who also max out their credit cards. Or people who want to be sexually pure and who also bookmark porn sites. Or people who want to speak Japanese without all the tiresome study that’s normally required. . . .

“Willard shows us how to get this life — eloquently and enduringly. He tells us that learning to enjoy God forever and to particiipate in his big project is entirely like learning competitive baseball or the violin or Italian. God has put joy inside sports, music-making, and cross-cultural conversation, but the only way to get joy out of them is to work at them. You’ve got to listen to your teacher, imitate him or her, and then practice a lot. The disciple is not greater than his master. If Jesus needed to learn obedience, so will Jesus’ disciples. We will need to train our brain, heart, hand, eye, and tongue to get us in shape for robust Christian living. Eyebrows, too, when they still have a haughty spirit. Fortunately, says Willard, the essential disciplines for Jesus’ disciples have been taught and learned for centuries, including by our Lord himself.”

Ordinary Radicals

Published
by
Mike
on August 18, 2006
in Books, Salt and Light and faith
. 43 Comments

I had a wonderful couple days in Rochester, Michigan while my luggage enjoyed a relaxing time at O’Hare in Chicago. Fortunately, it showed up just in time for me to haul it back to the airport and come home with me. Left with clean clothes; returned with clean clothes.

As I went and returned, I read Shane Claiborne’s new book The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical.

Read with care. This young man could rock your world! The very idea: living as an ordinary radical. It’s like Dallas Willard with steroids and dreadlocks. Claiborne believes that a Christian is, by definition, a disciple: a follower of Jesus. One who is called to participate in God’s work in this world.

My thanks to Zondervan for publishing this book. I’m sure it wasn’t a safe decision. Many won’t like it. Some will fume and rant. But I was inspired.

Claiborne, a member of The Simple Way in Philadelphia, is an activist in the best Christian sense: one who is willing to put his life on the line for justice and compassion. Here are some samples:

“We live in a world that wants things bigger and bigger. We want to supersize our fries, sodas, and church buildings. But amid all the supersizing, many of us feel God doing something new, something small and subtle. This thing Jesus called the kingdom of God is emerging across the globe in the most unexpected places, a gentle whisper amid the chaos. Little people with big dreams are reimagining the world.”

“We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor, but that rich Christians do not know the poor.”

“I remember when one of my colleagues said, ‘Shane, I am not a Christian anymore.’ I was puzzled, for we had gone to theology classes together, studied Scripture, prayed, and worshiped together. But I could see the intensity and sincerity in his eyes as he continued, ‘I gave up Christianity in order to follow Jesus.’ Somehow, I knew what he meant.”

“While the ghettos may have their share of violence and crime, the suburbs are the home of the more subtle demonic forces — numbness, complacency, comfort — and it is these that can eat away at our souls.”

“As I’ve heard my old mentor Tony Campolo say, ‘If we were to set out to establish a religion in polar opposition to the Beatitudes Jesus taught, it would look strikingly similar to the pop Christianity that has taken over the airwaves of North America.’”

It doesn’t take much imagination to predict that this book will join Don Miller’s Blue Like Jazzas a favorite among university students.