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?.....
...
...
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.

wotm? wtf??

i'm not a fan, by any means, of way of the master. for the uninitiated, wotm is a "ministry" that kirk cameron is a part of that takes to the street trying to convince people to become christians. not too long ago, they made asses of themselves debating an atheist group, who also made asses of themselves, on network television. i first heard of them through anne, because her brother used to be into them. recently, i was thinking about their methods.

they start by asking random people on the street, "do you think you're a good person"? most people say, "yes" so they then ask if the person has ever broken one of the ten commandments. of course, everyone says, "yes" so the follow-up question is, "then are you really a good person"? i'm probably leaving something out, but that's the gist of it. the idea is to convict the person, and make their conscience get to them. now, this can work all well and good if, in fact, the person believes in the bible. but if he or she doesn't, then it's pretty much an exercise in futility. i have enormous problems with their method, and them as a ministry, for a plethora of reasons which is a whole other series in and of itself. but, at the same time, i think they could have something with this. the problem, however, is with the ten commandments. my question is: if jesus is the fulfillment of the law, then wouldn't living like him be a much more powerful tool of conviction? after all, the entire law is summed up in just two commands, and the sermon on the mount is maybe the most radical way to live ever. so why try and bring conviction with the ten commandments?

now, i'm not about to say that i'm this person who acts like jesus all the time, convicting others, and causing them to want to follow jesus with me. i'm not. recently i got a low score for professionalism at work because this past year there has sucked, and sometimes i have a hard time keeping my cool. but not too long ago i was talking with a coworker. all this guy ever does is complain and run others down. so he was doing this, as we were talking, and i was acting as visibly disinterested as i possibly could. after he got done with his shpeel, he could tell i didn't want to hear it, and said, "i'm sorry but this place just needs to change... well... or maybe i'm the one who needs to change."

of course, he didn't drop to he knees and start confessing his sins or anything like that, but i like to hope that, in that moment, my actions brought some conviction and in my own way, i got to be jesus. and all without asking him if he's a good person.

alone?

jumping off my last post about having an ever-present awareness of the divine, i just got done watching the movie into the wild.

quick movie review:
go watch it. it's amazing.
review over.

so i'm watching the beginning, and there's this scene where the lead character is out in the middle of the alaskan wilderness and he shouts at the top of his lungs, "is there anybody there?" he then answers himself, "guess not!" this got me thinking: but we really aren't alone, right? there is always someone there. that's what it's all about. what does a spirituality look like where we never feel alone?

then something occured to me: the Lord God said, "it is not good for the man to be alone. i will make a helper suitable for him."

random thoughts & updates

lately, i've been struggling not to hate my job. i don't really want to be doing what i do, and doing something you're not really into for 3 years starts to take a toll. days like this, when i can think of a huge amount of things i'd like to do or be doing, make going into work that much harder. i really like what i'm studying at school. for fun, i have been reading my western civ. text book to brush up on my knowledge of WWI and WWII and i love it. the chapters are pretty big, but i just fly right through them. i've been doing some serious yard work lately. i think i'm being bitten by the home improvement bug, as i've dropped almost 100 dollars at home depot in the past couple days. i'm exited about finishing our upstairs so we can finally have our huge master suite, and more room.

this past weekend i got to catch up with some old friends. we went to a food festival in skee town, and then hit up this nice little bar. i don't get to go out like that often anymore, or with those people, so it was even more of a good time. house church was also a good time, we actually had a discussion where everyone chimed in. we talked about prayer. my after-thoughts on it are this: i said that my ideal "prayer life" is that i would have an ever-present awareness that God is at work, and be in constant communication with Him. Meaning that since we believe God is always present and is our friend and father, that we should always be listening and looking for Him, and always in a state of constant communication. going further, ancient people looked at the gods as over them, always ready to strike if they weren't happy, and people were to always be in a posture where they were trying to please the gods. christianity, however, raises the person up to God's eye-level, so to speak, into a relationship posture. it's interesting then, that our prayer is often much more ritualized, and formal looking -- more like the ancient understanding of god than the biblical one. lately, i've been noticing that how i talk to God-- the way i speak-- is so much different than how i talk to friends and family.

anyways, i'm just trying to be thankful that i have a job, since so many in our economy don't. i'm also exited about the number of opportunities we are getting with our business, and all the days off i have coming up in the near future.

on being a skeptical believer : doubts

last year, i wrote a post called "on being a skeptical believer." in it, i talked about my struggle with believing some of the more supernatural and mythical stuff in the bible. i also talked about my evolving faith. i think it's time for an update. i was going to post this all in one entry, but there is just too much to say, so i'm going to start by laying out reasons i struggle with doubt.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

in the year 2000 i had my first really big faith crisis. i started going online and reading all sorts of atheist websites, and was faced with arguments and ideas that i had never heard before. it was the beginning of a journey that led me away from the pre-packaged christianity i had been handed as a child and toward developing my own personal faith. according to fowler's stages of faith, i had entered stage four. this first faith crisis scared me and made me wonder how long i would remain a christian. however, since the beginning of this journey, i have learned that faith crises are part of it, and i now have them quite regularly.

my recent faith crisis was sparked by a comment that joe left on my other blog, asking me about my take on satan and demons. he asked me this because i mentioned that, while i struggle with my understanding of satan and demons, greg boyd is encouraging to me because he is an ivy league trained theologian and scholar who views them as literal beings. as i thought about how or if i would respond to joe, i decided to pick up greg boyd's book, letters from a skeptic which is, basically, a series of letters between him and his agnostic father. there's a part in the book where boyd discusses his view that there are evil cosmic forces at work in the world and points out that most of reality is made up of things we can't see. he also says that the world is, essentially, a cosmic battlefield. also, boyd points out that we-- modern people-- are the weird ones, because everyone else throughout the ages have believed in gods and evil spirits.

i agree, that it is entirely possible that there are evil spirits, and i also agree that the naturalist/materialist worldview that westerners hold is just that, another worldview, and we make the assumption that there isn't other forces or beings that exist. but isn't that the point? ancient people, and people ignorant of science, explain things they don't understand with supernatural explanations. for example, blessing someone after she sneezes comes from the belief that the act of sneezing was the release of an evil spirit. the belief in micro-organisms was once controversial because it contradicted the belief that sickness was caused by spiritual forces. so imagine a schizophrenic person living in, say, 50 B.C. how would schizophrenia be understood? as a mental illness? of course not. if you lived back then and you heard voices, people wouldn't believe there was something wrong with your brain, there would be a supernatural explanation. the universe is an incredibly amazing place, and the brain is arguably the most complex structure in it. is the reason everyone has believed in the supernatural up until the age of science because there was no other explanation?

another argument boyd puts forth is the argument for the existence of God from morality. this is also how c.s. lewis begins mere christianity. the gist of the argument is that because we intuitively know that murder or stealing is wrong, then there must be an ultimate source for that morality, namely God. but here's my problem. isn't much of our basic moral ideals rooted in self-preservation and our own happiness? we all agree not to murder because we, ourselves, don't want to be murdered. we essentially say, "ok, i'll allow you to live, if you allow me to live." the same goes for stealing. we make an agreement to allow each other to keep our own stuff. if someone breaks that agreement, then we get pissed. we then assign religious meaning to these rules and agreements to reinforce them

to close, i'll go back to the original topic of demons, which sparked all of this. i'm not sure that scripture itself views demons as literal beings. my prime example is the story of jesus casting out the demons collectively named "legion." this story is loaded with symbolism. first, the name legion is what an army of roman soldiers were called. second, jesus casts "legion" into a herd of pigs which were considered unclean according to jews. third, the pigs then drown in the sea, which immediately would conjure up images of the egyptian soldiers drowning in the red sea. so, is this a literal, just-telling-the-facts, recounting of actual events; or is the story saying that jesus is the messiah who will ultimately do away with the roman empire? or, was there really an exorcism, but the author took artistic liberty and added the symbolism?

crazy...

glad yesterday was my day off...