my encounter with a professional critic

this past friday i had the honor of being in my brother in law's wedding. he used to lived in california and wisconsin where he was part of a pretty militant group of pro-life demonstrators/street preachers. some of these guys were in his wedding. this made me a bit tense. i'm really not a big fan of getting into heated discussions about religion and politics with complete strangers, but i knew that if i even made small talk with any of them, that was bound to happen. i was right.

i was standing there when the person, who is pretty much their leader, approached me and started asking me basic getting-to-know-you questions. where ya from? watcha do? are you a christian? when did you become one? where ya go to church?.....
...
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uh... mars hill....
oh...... rob bell huh?......
yup...

so that was how it started. then he told me he saw a video with rob called bullhorn. for those who don't know, bullhorn is a video where rob kind of portrays ultra-extreme street preachers in a less than positive way. this conversation ended up getting into the value of street preaching and how rob is wrong in saying that God love's and accepts everyone. well, his problem wasn't so much with the love part as the accept part. to him, saying God accepts everyone just as they are mean's they will not face God's wrath and judgment, which basically means hell.

we went in circles for a while, and i actually agreed with almost everything he said. it just came down to our understanding of acceptance and the nature of forgiveness and repentance.

to him, God's forgiveness is available to everyone IF they repent (which basically means apologize). so when someone repents then they are accepted. but this just isn't biblical. jesus forgives the people who put him on the cross even though they know not what they do. God tells us that we must forgive everyone. he doesn't say they need to apologize first.

so to him, forgiveness and repentance is a transaction, while i see them as two separate things. repentance means to turn. it means to start living a new life. it means to be reborn. sure there is lamenting the things you have done in the past. birth is painful, and so is rebirth. but the idea isn't to attain God's forgiveness, but realize that one is already forgiven, and he or she can live a new life in a restored relationship with God, and begin having restored relationships with others. it's realizing that you are already accepted.

we discussed other related topics as well. for instance, the gospel is offensive, so that means we have to confront people with their sin so they'll repent of it. i mentioned that most people probably know they're pretty screwed up, and someone telling another how bad one is, isn't offensive because one thinks it's not true. it's offensive because a perfect stranger judging you is...well... offensive.

and really that is what bullhorn is all about. most people know their F'ed up, and someone shouting at them about it just isn't good news. but hearing how much their loved in spite of their faults and imperfections is.

on being a skeptical believer : complexity

reality is complex. there are different levels, and layers to everything. for example, there is the layer of reality that i can experience with my five senses, and there are multiple other layers that i can't e.g. the micro level. right now, there are sounds all around me from all over the world being carried by radio waves, that i can only experience with a radio. and like the fact that there is only so much i can experience, measure and test with my five senses, science is, ultimately, limited. so there are levels of reality that science is not ever able to test.

thinking about this has brought me to conclude that maybe the guy in the legion story was schizophrenic, and being controlled by a demon. recently, a guest teacher at my church mentioned that research has been done in the psycho-social field concerning the psychological damage caused by oppressive regimes. this adds another layer to this example. a person could be affected psychologically by sociological factors. all this to say that i think beings who operate on scientifically unmeasurable levels use natural phenomena to interact with this level of reality.

the ancients, with their apocalyptic worldview, simply cut to the chase.