Post 162--Good Friday

Today Christians all over the world for two millennia have been commemorating Good Friday. That is to say, the death of Jesus Christ by one of the most cruel executions the ancient Roman Empire ever devised, namely crucifixion. The story is told in the New Testament of the Bible at various places:  Matthew 27, Mark 15, Luke 23 and John 19.  If you’re not too familiar with the Bible, you will find the most understandable translation to be that called The Messenger.  I was almost going to say “the most pleasant translation,” but reading the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and the events leading up to it is anything but pleasant; it is heart wrenching, nothing pleasant about it.

In Post 161 I referred to Maudy Thursday, the day before Good Friday. Many churches attend special services that day, as my wife and I did in the evening at First Baptist Church in downtown Vancouver. The choir sang a few very beautiful hymns, but the last one really did me in. I broke down in tears, I was so emotionally overcome by the lyrics themselves as well as the melody and, not the least, the way it was sung. I played it on Utube again this morning and had the same experience. Even now, at this very moment, I have tears in my eyes. I am a singer and when I hear songs that I know, I sing along. But both last night and this morning, I was too overwhelmed to sing along. I could only listen and let waves of emotion run over me—emotions, I hasten to add, of joy, gladness and peace, but also of sadness and shame, because of the reason for all of this tragic drama, namely the sin that has distorted the entire world and every individual in it, including me.

Another word for sin is evil, both words that we, heirs of the Enlightenment of some centuries back and the subsequent rationalist philosophies it has spawned, including secularism and postmodernism, do not want to hear.  Well, evil is one word we may tolerate, but sin? No way. That’s nonsense, primitive. We will have no truck with it. Well, neither does God. But He does not deny its reality as most of us do. Instead, He provides a way out; He does not leave us stuck in or with it. The events from Christmas through Good Friday are the prelude to His way of overcoming it by diverting the punishment from us to Jesus. 

I know, for most of us it sounds like a bizarre story, something that no one immersed in our culture could possibly think up; it is simply too exotic for us. But, you know, much of our Western culture is exotic to most of the world. Every culture is exotic to another culture far away. But no matter what you do, it is always in the context of a specific culture that is exotic to almost every other culture. That’s just the way we are; we exist in various cultures, all of them exotic to others. So, if God was going to do something in the world of humans,  no matter what, He has to do it in terms of a specific culture. No way around it. That’s how we are created. He can’t do it in every culture. No one will understand.

So, for His own reason, he chose the culture that was started by Abraham and developed into Jewish culture of the ancient past in the Old Testament. Of course, it is exotic to us, for we live in another culture and have difficulty understanding that of the Bible. So, why do you reject it just because it is expressed in an exotic culture? Why would you insist that God did His special work with Jesus in our culture?  Isn’t that selfish?  Is that what you want to be? That ain’t very nice, you know, to put it mildly. 

So, we just have to bite the bullet and recognize that we live in an exotic culture that finds it difficult to understand events in another, but that does not make them untrue or false or a figment of someone’s imagination. Nor is it because the people in those days were primitive and ready to believe anything. There was an entire class of highly educated Jews who disbelieved the very notion of a resurrection. Same with some of the ancient Greek philosophers.  None of these people wanted to believe the story; it was too irrational for them. 

I herewith reproduce the lyrics of the song that so moves me. After that, I offer you the URLs of five different ways this song is sung. There are more and you can access them yourselves. Please read these lyrics carefully, slowly, meditatively. And then, when you’re done, as today’s newscasters tend to say, “Have a listen.” And respond with your heart. 

Go to Dark Gethsemane

Go to dark Gethsemane, you who feel the tempter’s power;

your Redeemer’s conflict see; watch with Him one bitter hour;

turn not from His griefs away; learn of Jesus Christ to pray.

Follow to the judgment hall; view the Lord of life arraigned.

O the wormwood and the gall! O the pangs His soul sustained!

Shun not suffering, shame, or loss; learn of Him to bear the cross.

Calvary’s mournful mountain climb; there, adoring at His feet,

mark that miracle of time, God’s own sacrifice complete:

“It is finished!” hear Him cry; learn of Jesus Christ to die.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD6tcMroY0A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jY_qrAjFyM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1jpg1Ioei4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o09BMI-whLA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCk4IK3ZRXc

Post 144—Ignorance and Prejudice in the Citadel of Academia—Harvard

Harvard is considered to be the topnotch Ivy League university in the USA, if not the world. (I have to be careful here, for my two sons who graduated from Yale are bound to chastise me for this assertion, but I think I’m safe, for they probably don’t read this blog!)  It probably deserves that accolade, but that does not keep extreme ignorance and prejudice from its campus, not even from its professors.  This statement may surprise well you. Ignorant and prejudiced Harvard professors?  Come on; that can’t be.  Well, it can and is. 

Though Harvard started out as a Christian university, it has bought deeply and totally into the spirit of modernism and secularism, though some might argue that today modernism and secularism are being or already have been displaced by postmodernism.  That maybe so, but from the perspective of this article that does not make a lot of difference. Both create the same kind of situation I am about to describe for you. 

In fact, that secular or, if you prefer, postmodern spirit is so all-pervasive on the Harvard campus and is pushed down everyone’s throat so vigorously, that Christian students have felt the need to support each other while studying there to withstand the contempt with which they are regarded.  So, they established the Anselm House where they connect “Faith and Knowledge with All of Life”—their slogan; the same goal, by the way, of this blog. 

One of the members of Anselm House, a female student, wrote the following story:

Sometimes, I feel just the littlest bit defensive when I tell classmates and acquaintances at Harvard that I did my master’s degree at the University of Minnesota. Many of my fellow graduate students are coming from places like Columbia, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, and Oxford, and a Midwestern state university gets an occasional quizzical look. But I wouldn’t trade my two years at the University of Minnesota for two years anywhere else. There’s at least one area in which our very own UMN is at the cutting edge of higher education, providing resources and opportunities I could have gotten at very few other universities: its vibrant and active Christian study center.

Anselm House prepared me to face the rigors and challenges of study at Harvard with confidence in my Christian faith. When one of my English professors said casually, as an off-hand aside, “Of course a religious person can’t really be a professor,” I was ready to challenge his assertion that religious commitments limit freedom of inquiry in a way that secular presuppositions don’t—and I did so with arguments backed by my reading of Charles Taylor, James K. A. Smith, and Michael Polayni, because I’d read those works and discussed those questions at the study center.

As I studied the history of the Bible and its reception in different periods, I saw countless ways that my academic study of the Bible as a book and my personal experience of the Bible as the word of God could enrich one another, and I talked about my daily devotions in class—because as a MacLaurin Fellow I learned about scholars like Mark Noll and James Turner who are open about how their identity as Christians informs their research.

When, on the first day of one of my seminars, we went around the room and shared why each of us was in graduate school, I didn’t hesitate to say that I want to grow in the virtues I’ve been called to in the context of friendships based on shared pursuit of excellence—because at Anselm House I was surrounded by people for whom it was second nature to think of work in spiritual, moral, and relational terms.

It’s a slightly weird answer. It probably earned me a few more quizzical looks. But I don’t mind occasionally standing out as a Christian, because I know that there are countless brilliant and thoughtful people—in Minnesota and around the world—who share a vision of education that unites all things in Christ. I hope that during my time here at Harvard, I’ll get to tell many people that my studies are by the grace, and for the glory, of God.

   

I bolded this sentence in the story:  “Of course a religious person can’t really be a professor.”  Can you imagine a Harvard professor being so closed minded, so ignorant and so prejudiced as to make such a statement while surrounded by the most brilliant students in the nation?  And can you imagine that these alleged brilliant students simply soaked it in without challenging this nonsense?  It took this one single Christian female student to dare to challenge this ridiculous statement.

Well, that’s the power of faith for you. A closed faith filtered by the secular tunnel vision can stupefy even the most brilliant. There are thousands of Christian professors on all the faculties of all America’s universities. These professors do research and lecture, they write books, they engage in politics and everything else social, and this man has not run into even one of them who left his mark on one campus or another?  Simply incredible! I am dazed with incredulity!  How can such a prejudiced and ignorant professor be retained? 

Let me give you one single example from a document randomly lying on my desk today: Dr. Alvin Plantinga. Here is a brief bio:

Among many honors, Plantinga is the past president of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division, and the Society of Christian Philosophers, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. With a PhD in Philosophy from Yale University, Dr. Plantinga is widely known for his work in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics and Christian apologetics. He delivered the Gifford Lectures three times, and was a Guggenheim Fellow 1971-1972. In 2012, the University of Pittsburgh’s Philosophy Department, History and Philosophy of Science Department, and the Center for the History and Philosophy of Science awarded him the prestigious Rescher Prize.

Now, you tell me: This Christian "can't really be a professor?!"  Can this obscure little Harvard boy even stand in Plantinga's shadow? If you happen to be acquainted with Harvard faculty, know that this prof is a man in the English department. I would love to give you his name, but I don’t have it.

This is New Year’s Eve. I did not plan to write such a sharp post today. I wanted to write something about the passing of time or some such topic, but when I read the above story, I was so incensed I just had to pick up the sword and….  It’s probably a good thing I don’t know his name and that I am far removed from him. For that, I credit the grace of God. But for that, I’m not sure what I would have done!

Happy new year!  Enter it with your eyes and mind open and discard whatever secular tunnel vision may be blinding and limiting you. Check out Jesus, who described Himself as “the way, the truth and the life.”  I have not been able to find a more exciting and liberating perspective than that!

Post 70--Born Again

You’ve come to expect a mix of religious and so-called “secular” topics from me. I’ve explained the reasons for that more than once. It is simply that they are not two separate areas or regions so much as that religion underlies all subjects; it serves as their substratum.  They do not exist as separate entities so much as the religious infusing and shaping everything else. 

And so, today we jump from the topic of water consumption to that of being born again. The reason for my concern for the economics and ecology of water consumption is precisely because I am born again. Of course, reason, observation, experience, etc., all play a part as well, but the direction in which they lead you is ultimately decided by your value system, your worldview, your beliefs and, finally, your religion, i.e., your ultimates. If you are truly born again, then water issues must concern you, for they are so basic to the life of your neighbor throughout the world.

Born again. In the minds of the average writer in the Vancouver Sun (VS) this is about the most vicious pejorative you can use to describe Christian Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, especially their American versions.  Once you have described Evangelical or Fundamentalist action as the result of being born again, you no longer have to take it seriously; it is guaranteed to be wrong, damaging, anti-social, ridiculous even. Nothing further needs to be said.

But what is this thing called “born again?”   Let’s go back to the original reference to it in the Bible:

Jesus Teaches Nicodemus

Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. ² He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”

³ Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.^[a]”

⁴ “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”

⁵ Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. ⁶ Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit^[b] gives birth to spirit. ⁷ You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You^[c]must be born again.’ ⁸ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3).

It must be admitted that Jesus’ explanation is not too clear to our modern way of thinking, but one thing is clear: It is necessary if we wish to see the Kingdom of God.  It is not just something nice, not just icing on the cake of salvation; It is a necessary condition.  Without it you cannot see the Kingdom of God; without it, you cannot be a Christian. That’s pretty drastic. 

Since the early history of Christian theology, scholars have widely discussed the meaning of being born again. I hope to take you through some of that in the next post.  However, it is no wonder that it is unpopular with the secular crowd. The need for it is the human condition, which, according to both the Bible and Christian theology, is totally distorted.  May I say the word?  Sinful!  Stronger still, dead in sin!  There, I’ve said it. Phew! Now that ain’t pretty and it’s not going to raise my popularity with my favourite VS writers, most of whom I appreciate and read regularly. 

No wonder that proud mankind is offended by this evaluation of human nature. And no wonder most folk try to evade its truth by poking fun of it and castigating it for its association in our minds with extreme fundies in the southern USA. In terms of the West, it has been rejected in principle ever since the Renaissance centuries ago and by the subsequent philosophical developments through rationalism, secularism and post-modernism.  It is offensive, humiliating, demeaning. It is one of the reasons the dominant worldview in the West rejects it outright and pokes fun of it.