Sermon Illustrations on Transcendence

Fit Bodies, Fat Minds

Mark 12:30

In his book FIT BODIES, FAT MINDS, Os Guinness describes how Christians have “simultaneously toned up their bodies and dumbed down their minds.”(1) He connects the contemporary form of Christian anti-intellectualism with Friedrich Nietzsche's prediction of “the last man.” Losing touch with transcendence, people would eventually confuse heaven with happiness and happiness with health. Nietzsche's book THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA is the perfect parody of the contemporary jogger and dieter, says Guinness. Health has replaced heaven. Athleticism is the new form of asceticism. Self-mastery and fulfillment are promised through exercise and positive thinking.

I have been a fitness instructor for five years — it is my favorite recreational activity. How invigorating it is to strengthen and stretch tired muscles after a long day. I am also a romantic optimist, constantly on the lookout for the tiniest glimmer of hope during frustrating circumstances. While there is nothing wrong with exercise and optimism, our challenge as Christians today is to deliberately reflect on our lifestyle and thought-style on a daily basis. How can we live healthfully and joyously without subtly degrading the service of God into the service of self?

If we fail to think critically about the motivating factors underlying our lifestyle choices, our minds will be terribly unfit. William Lane Craig adds, “Intellectual impoverishment with respect to one's faith can thus lead to spiritual impoverishment as well.”(2) I am not suggesting that intellectualism is the solution to anti-intellectualism and spiritual starvation. Intellectualism as concerned only with the disembodied life of the mind is contrary to biblical teaching. But we are to love God with every inch of our being — with our heart, our soul, our mind, and our strength. Thinking as a spiritual discipline involves the whole person — soul and body. It is as active and demanding as rigorous physical exercise; it is neither automatic nor easy. Moreover, thinking deeply about matters of faith is not just a purely human activity relying solely on one's own strength; it must operate from the utter reliance on God's Word and Spirit.

Such dependence on God in the midst of discipline should remind us that our deepest motivation to be thinking Christians should not be merely to win arguments, but to captivate the lost with the love of Christ as we ourselves have been captivated. As powerful alternatives to the gospel proliferate all around us, let us prayerfully increase our fitness to fight for the gospel in ways that are persuasive, imaginative, and compassionate.

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1. Os Guinness, FIT BODIES, FAT MINDS (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994).

2. William Lane Craig, REASONABLE FAITH (Wheaton: Crossway, 1994).

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[Original illustration at this number was deleted for being obsolete]

Transcendence: Now A Secular Quest

Mark 7:6

Secular people are searching for meaning in life. Paranormal experiences are popular, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" summaries the attitude. Believers are shunned by the establishment, but they persevere. Little children are especially open to it. In the end even the scientists bow down and worship.

"This claim to a secular experience of transcendence constitutes a powerful challenge to the quality of our Christian public worship."

Christian worship is often weak. We need to listen to Jesus' criticism of religion. The OT prophets were also strong on it.

Tremors of Glory

John 11:40

Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn often wrestles with the tension we face as humans in a world that is not really ours. In his song “Rumours of Glory” he observes that behind the pain and fear sketched on our faces “something is shining, like gold but better: rumours of glory.”

What are these rumors of glory? The knowledge that there is something beyond us, that we exist — indeed we were created — for something beyond this world ... and beyond our wildest dreams. WE WERE CREATED FOR GLORY.

For most of the twentieth century, the very idea of transcendence and metaphysics had been a subject of derision. The “realist” vision of the many prophets of natural philosophy — Freud, Marx, Darwin — has dominated the public imagination and conversation. Life is what we know it, right here and right now. In fact, Freud's colleague Erich Fromm once wrote, “Man's pride has been justified. By virtue of his reason he has built a material world the reality of which surpasses even the dreams and visions of fairy tales and utopias.”(1)

Our belief in God is just a dream or illusion, they contend; what we construct for ourselves is what is actually real. Freud, of course, argued that belief in God was a projection of our deep-seated feelings of helplessness and need for protection, and therefore constituted “the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.”(2)

Years before Freud came upon the scene, these two competing visions of the world existed. The rationalism of the Enlightenment was quickly countered by the passion of the Romantics in search of an alternative, and these two views continue to do battle over the nature of reality, truth, and life. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth opposed this Enlightenment view, and wrote of the “intimations of immortality,” speaking not only of the specter of death, but that one's immortality is actually A WINDOW TO THE SOUL.

And though some would rather not look too closely into that window, each of us still searches for transcendence. From extreme sports to films, we want to look our immortality in the eye and somehow, transcend it.

The question, it seems then, is does our world hint at “rumors of glory” or mere “visions of fairy tales” — delusions of what we wish we had or wish we were? However, if such signs are just DEAD-ENDS that lead to nowhere, why do they actually COMPEL US to journey farther down the road?

“God may have DESIGNED US in such a way that these sorts of processes (such as reason and longing) enable us to come to know God personally,” notes my former colleague Paul Copan, “and we are at our cognitive best when our faculties direct us toward true belief in God.”

Is it not unreasonable then to believe that such rumors of glory are more than mere rumors? Perhaps, even tremors? Standing in front of her brother's tomb, Martha was asked a similar question by Jesus Christ. “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” (John 11:40) In a loud voice Jesus called forth Lazarus. The witnesses watched as the dead man came out, and they trembled at the tremors of God's glory.

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1. Erich Fromm in MAN FOR HIMSELF, quoted in Paul Vitz, PSYCHOLOGY AS RELIGION: THE CULT OF SELF-WORSHIP (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Eerdmans, 1985), 19.

2. Sigmund Freud in THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION, quoted in Paul Vitz, FAITH OF THE FATHERLESS: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATHEISM (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 1999), 6.

Danielle DuRant is research assistant at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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[Original illustration at this number was deleted for being obsolete]

Does the Supernatural Exist?

Some people reject even the possibility that there is a supernatural dimension to life.

This view is reflected in the Humanist Manifesto (II), which was written in 1973.

The first paragraph of the Manifesto states:

"We find insufficient evidence for belief in the existence of the supernatural; it is either meaningless or irrelevant..."

It continues:

"We can discover no divine purpose or plan for human species. While there is much that we do not know, humans are responsible for what we are or will become. No deity will save us - we must save ourselves."

Literally thousand of scientists, educators and political leaders have put their signatures on this document.

"I'll Believe It When I See It"

John 1:45

Sermon in John series. Nathanael. John 1:45-51

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I'LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT

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I. Flies on the Sistine Chapel.

II. Come and see!

A. A man named Nathanael.

B. Few get saved by arguments. 1 Peter 3:15

III. He's from New Jersey???!! 1:46

A. We like to label people.

B. Be skeptical, but open, too.

IV. How Jesus sees a person. 1:47

A. Jesus knows Nathanael's character.

B. How does Jesus know?

C. Exclamation of faith. 1:49

V. Stairway to heaven. Genesis 28:10-22

A. Jesus can do more than read minds. He can open heaven. 1:51

B. We yearn for a deeper spiritual experience.

C. Don't stop seeking the deeper life.

"A Nineties Kind of Woman"

John 4:4

Sermon in John series. Samaritan woman at well. John 4:4-29

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A NINETIES KIND OF WOMAN

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I. Are you satisfied?

II. A meeting of opposites.

III. Jesus drops the "hook." 4:10

IV. Getting a husband.

A. Jesus' simple request brings out her condition. 4:16

B. Sex as the new religion.

C. Our desire for sexuality is really a desire for meaning.

V. When cornered, use religion.

A. Woman is cut to soul, perceives Jesus as prophet. 4:19

B. Where is right place to worship? 4:20

C. Further deflection by woman. 4:25

VI. Only Jesus can satisfy.

A. All of us make bad choices.

B. When our deepest thirst is satisfied, all other things take

their rightful place in life.

C. Surest sign he satisfies you - you go and tell others.

In the Name of Sophia

John 1:1

In the Name of Sophia: Seeking a biblical understanding of holy wisdom.

Few recent controversies have been as explosive as the one raging around the invocation of Sophia in worship, especially at the ecumenical Re-Imagining conference held last year in Minneapolis. Before that conference caused such a stir, few Christians realized the Christian heritage of that word: sophia is the Greek word for wisdom. The New Testament uses it when speaking, for instance, of the wisdom of God (Rom. 11:33; 1 Cor. 1:24; Eph. 3:10). However, other religious systems around that time had a goddess named Sophia, so the word can also express pagan notions.

Nevertheless, it also plays an important role in Scripture. In the Old Testament, Wisdom (chokma in Hebrew, sophia in the Greek Old Testament) is often celebrated, and most lavishly in Proverbs 1-9. Wisdom is there personified in female form. She is praised in exalted terms: “all the things you may desire cannot compare with her” (3:15), for “she is a tree of life” (3:18), and her “fruit is better than gold” (8:19). Wisdom cries out in the streets, especially encouraging the “simple” and “scoffers” to gain deeper understanding (1:20-23; 8:1-6). Nonetheless, most people reject her (1:24-27).

Wisdom also has a cosmic role: “I have been established from everlasting,” she sings, “from the beginning, before there was ever an earth” (8:23). When God created, “I was beside him as a master craftsman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him” (8:30). Yet despite these lofty functions, Wisdom in Proverbs does not seem to be an actual divine being, but rather a personification of one of Yahweh’s attributes.

This Wisdom imagery expands in later Hebrew literature, most of it now found in the Apocrypha. Since Protestants have not accepted these writings as canonical, they are often unaware of how great an impact some of it had on the New Testament. But notice the apocryphal book Wisdom, which declares that Sophia “pervades and penetrates all things. / For she is a breath of the power of God, / a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty… / a reflection of eternal light, / a spotless mirror of the working of God, / And an image of his goodness” (Wisdom 7:25-26).

Now compare this with Hebrews 1:3, which calls Jesus, God’s Son, “the brightness of his glory / and the express image of his person, / and upholding all things through the word of his power.” Almost all biblical scholars agree that in formulating this description, the writer of Hebrews was significantly influenced by the former passage.

Hebrew Wisdom imagery also helped shape John’s concept of Christ as the Word (logos). Like Wisdom, the Word was with God from the beginning (John 1:1-2; Prov. 8:22-23; Wisdom 6:22; Sirach 24:9). Both manifest God’s glory (John 1:14; Wisdom 7:25) and bestow light and life (John 1:4-5, 9; Wisdom 7:26; Prov. 3:18). Like Wisdom, the Word descended from heaven to bestow God’s truth (John 1:14, 17-18; Sirach 24:8-11; Baruch 3:37; Wisdom 9:9-10), but was not generally received (John 1:11; Prov. 1:24-27; 1 Enoch 42). These themes appear not only in John’s prologue (1:1-18), but also throughout his gospel.

Wisdom imagery also lies behind Colossians 1:15-17. This text, Hebrews 1:2-3, and John 1:1-18 are probably the three most extensive New Testament affirmations of Christ’s deity. Many evangelical commentaries illuminate these passages’ indebtedness to Wisdom terminology (see, for instance, the relevant volumes in the “New International Commentary on the New Testament” [Eerdmans] and the “Word Biblical Commentary”).

Moreover, most participants in the Christological controversies of the early Christian centuries, which formed the classical confessions of Christ’s deity, understood Wisdom in Proverbs 8 to refer to Christ. Jaroslav Pelikan, dean of current church historians, maintains that in this process “the basis for the fullest statement of … the divine in Christ as Logos was provided not by … John 1:1-14 but by Proverbs 8:22-31.”

If Sophia/Wisdom imagery occurs in such basic texts, it should not surprise us to find it elsewhere. Paul, in fact, calls Christ “the Wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24; cf. 1:30). Matthew seems to indicate that Jesus regarded himself as Wisdom. Consider, for example, Jesus’ well-known words “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matt. 11:28-29).

This seems similar to Sophia’s call in Sirach 51:26-27: “Draw near to me, you who are untaught … why are your souls very thirsty? … Put your neck under the yoke, and let your souls receive instruction… See with your eyes that I have labored little and have found for myself much rest.”

Moreover, Luke reports that the “Wisdom of God” said, “I will send them prophets and apostles … “ (Luke 11:49); yet, in the parallel passage in Matthew, Jesus himself says, “I will send you prophets … “ (Matt. 23:34).

The basic point of this biblical overview should be clear: the central New Testament texts that affirm the deity of Jesus Christ draw on language about Wisdom/Sophia. Now, if the New Testament authors could employ Sophia imagery to describe the God revealed in Christ, contemporary Christians can surely make some valid use of it in worshiping this same God.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

But alas!-the issue of how we can use Wisdom language in worship, as the current furor attests, is far from simple. For although Sophia terminology was applied to Jesus in ancient times, it also designated non-Christian deities. How, then, in our world, where Sophia language is unfamiliar and open to misuse, might the church employ it? Let me suggest several guiding principles.

The first, fundamental principle of Christian worship must be that worship can be addressed only to the One, Trinitarian God. Worship of any other god or goddess is idolatry (1 Cor. 8:5-6).

A second worship principle, however, is that experience of this Trinitarian God is varied. As Creator of everything that is, and as Bestower of a many-sided, far-reaching redemption, the Christian God is known and praised through a wide range of creatures and activities. For this reason, Christian worship has ascribed a great variety of adjectives and names to God.

Consider, for instance, the beloved hymn “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise.” I find 18 adjectives or names for God in its first two stanzas. Some-such as the mysterious “unresting, unhasting, and silent as light”-do not appear to be literal equivalents of biblical words. The poet’s creativity played a role in forming them. Yet they surely evoke awe of the biblical God.

“Wisdom” is among those titles often ascribed to Christ. Consider, for example, the moving imagery of an English text associated with Bach’s exalted music: “Jesu, Joy of man’s desiring / Holy Wisdom, Love most bright; / Drawn by Thee, our hearts aspiring / Soar to Uncreated Light.”

As with many other titles, Wisdom can sometimes be applied to Jesus without specifying who is meant. For instance, each stanza of the familiar “O come, O come, Emmanuel” begins by invoking a different name: Emmanuel, Rod of Jesse, Dayspring, Key of David, Wisdom, and Desire of Nations. Since it is clear who is being addressed, the words Jesus and Christ do not-and need not-appear in this hymn.

According to our second principle of worship, then, there is no reason why Sophia could not function as a divine title, or a source of imagery, enriching Christian awareness of God. Yet any such use must be consistent with our first principle: It should be clear that such worship is being directed to the Triune God alone.

Since Sophia is presently unfamiliar to most Christians, and is troubling to some, this title and its associated imagery is best used in conjunction with others that clearly refer to Christ or God. Sophia seems more likely to arouse objections when this name is invoked alone, allowing the impression that a different deity is being addressed.

Although Christian worship should engage the emotions and senses and does not always need to be filtered through the rational mind, it should always be consistent with Christian teaching. Thus, when new themes are being introduced, some instruction is helpful. Moreover, when novel or questionable practices emerge, it is appropriate to ask whether they accord with the church’s beliefs.

A POLEMICAL CLAMOR

I am glad that questions are being raised about events like Re-Imagining because some features accompanying the current Sophia emphasis are questionable in light of Scripture. For instance, while the Bible indeed teaches that God is “immanent,” or present in some sense everywhere (Jer. 23:24; Eph. 1:23), the biblical God is also “transcendent,” or vastly superior to and different from everything else; similarly, while Jesus Christ is like us in being fully human, Christ is quite unlike us in being fully divine.

Much current Sophia worship, however, is so focused on an immanent divine presence, and seems to regard Jesus as so little different from us, that one can often ask whether anything other than the depths of nature or the human self is being invoked, and hence divinized. When numerous such expressions emerge at a conference funded and attended by several denominations, church members can appropriately question them.

I am not entirely happy, however, with how this questioning has occurred. We live in a society where people’s awareness, shaped by the news and entertainment media, is dominated by conflict. Only disagreements seem to get attention. This atmosphere demands that individuals align themselves quickly with one of the warring camps in every dispute, and live thenceforth in dread of the demonic designs of the other.

In an atmosphere in which everything seems “black or white,” we may overlook the fact that new worship forms involve creativity, and hence risk. Some may place all who attend such events under suspicion, leaving the impression that all participants must have agreed with every public statement. This may frighten those attracted by the biblical Sophia either into silence, or into the arms of the pagan Sophia’s more extreme advocates.

To be sure, a line exists between truth and falsehood, and stand for truth we must. But even if we assess the effects of Re-Imagining very negatively, biblical Christians do not need to conform to the polemical pattern of our age. In the current controversy, we need to see more of the patient, humble attitude that recognizes the danger of being too “simple” or a “scoffer,” and heeds the call to “cry out for discernment, and lift up your voice for understanding … seek [Wisdom] as silver, and search for her as for hidden treasures” (Prov. 2:3-4).

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Thomas Finger is professor of systematic and spiritual theology at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, Harrisonburg, Virginia.

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Magic Realism Goes To the Movies

Mark 6:2

Cinema is the most holistic of art forms. It is visual, stealing from the tool chests of painters and photographers. It is text-based, drawing on the potentials of literature and drama. Finally, film is musical; filmmakers have never been bashful about ransacking the finest and most varied musical libraries for their scores and soundtracks.

Given their holistic nature, perhaps it is no surprise that movies have recently gravitated toward magic realism, a literary genre that tries to wrap itself around all dimensions of reality. It is magic in its inclusion of the transcendent and the “fantastic.” It is realism in that it is not set in a wholly fictional world, such as Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Nor do its characters move back and forth between two separate worlds, like the children in Lewis’s Narnia tales, who dwell in “our” world (wartime Britain) until they pass through a portal (the wardrobe) into another, enchanted universe. Instead, in the novels of such magic realists as Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Isabel Allende, and Alice Hoffman, the ordinary and the extraordinary are inextricably interwoven. Now filmmakers have begun to exploit the potential of these conventions.

A salient theme of magic realist films is that people have their lives transformed once they get at least one foot outside the modern, technological world. For instance, director Mike Newell’s British protaganists in Enchanted April (1992) find realistic magic at a villa overlooking the Italian Riviera. Newell’s Into the West (1993) has two Irish children discover life-giving marvels in the real world when they are borne along by the animals and folk epistemology of Gypsies who ramble the countryside in horse-drawn caravans.

Such a transformation is at the heart of Bill Forsyth’s quirky classic Local Hero (1983). Forsyth’s movie concerns a Houston oilman who is thrust out of his high-tech world into a Scottish coastal village. The character, played by Peter Riegert, is charged with buying out the entire village so a gargantuan refinery can be built on its strategic site. At first the quaint customs and slow pace of the village bemuse Riegert. Sometimes they also irritate him. Stripped of the high-tech accouterments of his trade, he can report to Houston only by phoning from a bright-red telephone booth, which he plies with pocketfuls of coins, and which produces a chancy connection with a Houston boss whose office is appointed not only with a state-of-the-art telephone but also with its very own planetarium and observatory-quality telescope.

So disencumbered, Riegert’s oilman can begin to see the village as the beautifully located and genuine community it is. (My favorite haiku springs irresistibly to mind: “His barn having burned to the ground, he could see the moon again.”) Eventually he can notice that the pretty marine biologist he comically tries to romance has webs between her toes. She is nothing less than a scuba-diving mermaid. At the last, known as something unique and far better than the site of one more oil refinery, the village is not bought out. But to his credit, Forsyth does not succumb to sentimenality and let Riegert’s character escape once for all to the Scottish village. The oilman returns to Houston. The film ends with him on the balcony of his apartment, gazing out over traffic and its rising, honky clatter. He has not abandoned his technologically overwhelmed world, but he can now see it and know it for more than he did before. Mermaids use scuba-diving gear. Who knows, there may be a mermaid driving one of those cars.

Likewise, Bille August’s The House of the Spirits (1994), with its story ranging from the late 1800s into the 1970s, shows us men and women who use technology but do not have their field of vision reduced to the merely physical and material. The heroine of House (played compellingly, as always, by Meryl Streep) is a woman of European descent, born and living in South America, and possessed of striking paranormal powers. As a girl, she demonstrates psychokinetic abilities by moving, without touching it, a vase across the table. She sees into the future, correctly predicting the outcome of political elections and-quite disturbingly-the death of a beloved family member. Arrived at adulthood she will kiss ghosts and, after her own death, deliver ghostly kisses. As her daughter later observes, she dwells in a world where “logic and the laws of physics [don’t] always apply.”

The world of modern, technological materialism is one where logic and the laws of physics (as we understand them) always apply. In its earlier days, materialism was not quite so totalitarian. It allowed that the nonmaterial might exist but strictly quarantined it to a world separate from ordinary and day-to-day “real life.” This is the uneasy limbo probably still occupied by most modern, Western Christians. The so-called supernatural might occasionally intrude on the natural, but if it does so, it is committing exactly that-an intrusion. The natural and supernatural worlds are best kept apart. The supernatural had better not occur often, and when it does, it must appear with bells and trumpets or other conspicuous warnings that mark it as clearly alien. Better yet, it might also be confined to antiquity. Thus the miraculous “really did happen” in the distant past-a Messiah, for example, really did rise from the grave-but once God knocked the cosmic pinball machine from tilt back into play, he and his ilk could return securely to heaven where they belong.

Yet this naturalistic world-view, even when modified to allow God to have acted once, is in the vast sweep of history stunningly parochial. So far as we know, it is only the modern West that has imagined that the whole of existence is restricted to that which can be physically detected or scientifically regulated. Even such significant early moderns as Columbus believed themselves to have seen mermaids (which he remarked in his ship’s log to be “not as beautiful as they are painted, for they had something masculine in the countenance”). And to this day, in places where modernity has not yet wholly triumphed, there are persistent reports of events and phenomena that defy naturalistic explanation.

This outlook, much more than the parochial modern perspective, strikes me as like the biblical world-view. Yahweh does not seem to be confined mostly to a room somewhere beyond the stage of the human drama. In fact, the Lord is quite often on that stage, if sometimes hidden in the scenery. The Israelites are constantly seeing this Supreme Character at work. When Pharaoh refuses to release the people, the Lord has hardened his heart. When Pharaoh finally relents, that act is no less of the Lord. Similarly, Jesus’ miracles are not announced with blaring trumpets and set off from everyday life. He shows the truth and character of God not by summoning legions of angels from the clouds, but by spitting in the dirt and rubbing mud in a man’s eye. In short, I suspect magic realist filmmakers such as Mike Newell or Bille August can help us imagine and live in the world as the Bible depicts it much more fittingly than could such strict modernists as Cecil B. DeMille. (DeMille’s haloed Jesus was quite reassuring. You always safely knew when you were confronted by God in the flesh, and needn’t worry about missing him in the guise of a prisoner or a beggar.)

So, besides what I take to be the considerable and often enjoyable art of these magic realist filmmakers, I think they offer practice in seeing the world as Christians ought to see it. That does not mean we must indiscriminately reassert the literal reality (whatever that highly modern category means) of mermaids and leprechauns. Nor does it mean we must uncritically endorse clairvoyance, ghost sightings, or any number of “New Age” trappings. What it does mean is that we need no longer continue being tone-deaf to the spiritual and colorblind to the wondrous. Here is the message we are getting from magic realists (and recent philosophers of science, for that matter): The world is not so small, not so easily contained and controlled as we once thought. The modern scientific vocabulary need not be our only vocabulary, nor does it necessarily and always trump competing vocabularies. There are other, and significant, and real ways to cut up and categorize the world. And some of these other categories may help us to see and reclaim things we have long missed.

A scene near the end of The House of the Spirits typifies the way magic realism can give us salutary practice in reperceiving the world, in terms less constricted than those of materialistic modernity and more appropriate to the richer terms of the Christian faith.

Meryl Streep’s character has died. Her daughter has been abducted and tortured by a military junta. Bruised and despairing, the daughter lies alone on a prison floor. The ghost of her mother comes to her, awakens her, takes her head in her lap, and exhorts her to “fight to live, for life is a miracle.” Of course, one way to hear these words is the modern, liberal way, which is to hear “miracle” reduced to the merely symbolic. As the liberal theologians put it, why hanker after multitudes fed and a Messiah bodily risen from the dead? Life itself is a miracle.

Yet in The House of Spirits, it is not a liberal theologian but a ghost speaking. Earlier in the film, ghosts have been shown capable of opening doors, of sighting by multiple witnesses. What this decidedly unmodern ghost is saying is that life is wonderful in all sorts of ways, including many that cannot be captured or comprehended by naturalistic reductionism. In the world of magic realism, the daughter revives, and lives. So may we.

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Breaking Through

Hebrews 10:10

Sermon on importance of holiness, in life and in church. Heb 12:25-29

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BREAKING THROUGH

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I. Why are you in church?

II. Sacred and secular.

A. God is different.

B. Unclean -> clean -> holy.

III. Holiness in the Christian life.

A. The possibility of holiness.

B. Become what you are. Hebrews 10:10; 12:14

C. Importance of moral commitment.

IV. What makes a church special.

A. The marks of a genuine church.

B. Different views.

V. Is anything sacred anymore?

A. Sacramentalists.

B. The Baptist approach.

C. Ordinances don't make us holy, but remind us of God.

Why We Worship

John 1:51

Jacob's theophany, his dream of angels on a stairway to heaven, has always struck me as an appealing tale of unmerited grace. Here's a man who had just deceived his father and cheated his brother out of an inheritance. But God's response to finding Jacob vulnerable, sleeping all alone in open country, is not to strike him down for his sins, but to give him a great blessing.

Jacob wakes from the dream in awe, exclaiming, "Surely the LORD is in this place - and I did not know it!... this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!" For once, his better instincts take hold, and he responds by worshiping God. He takes the stone that he'd kept close by all night, perhaps to use as a weapon if a wild animal or his furious brother, Esau, were to attack him, and sets it up as a shrine, leaving it for future travelers so that they, too, will know that this is a holy place, the dwelling place of God.

Jacob's exclamation is a reminder that God really can chose to dwell everywhere and anywhere we go. One morning this past spring I noticed a young couple with an infant at the airport departure gate. The baby was at the stage where she loved to look into people's faces, and it seemed that as soon as she recognized a human face, no matter whose it was, old or young, pretty or ugly, bored or happy or worried-looking, she would respond with delight.

It was beautiful to see. But even more that that, it brought Jacob, and God's presence, to mind. Our drab departure gate had become the gate of heaven. And as I watched the baby play with any adult who would allow it, I felt as awe-struck as Jacob, because I realized that this is how God looks at us, staring into our faces in order to be delighted to see the creature he made and has promised to be with always. And because, as Psalm 139 puts it, darkness is as nothing to God, he can look right through whatever evil we've done in our lives to the creature he made in his own image.

I suspect that only God, and well loved infants, can see this way. But it gives me hope to think that when God gazed on the sleeping Jacob, he looked right through the schemer and saw something good, if only a capacity for awe, for recognizing and worshiping God. That Jacob will worship badly, trying to bargain with God, doesn't seem to matter. God promises to be with him and remain with him.

Peter denied Jesus, and Saul persecuted the early Christians, but God could see the apostles they would become. God does not punish Jacob as he lies sleeping, because he can see in him Israel, the founder of God's people. God loves to look at us, and loves it when we will look back at him. Even when we try to run away from our troubles, as Jacob did, God will find us and bless us, even when we feel most alone, unsure if we'll survive the night. God will find a way to let us know that he is with us in this place, wherever we are, however far we think we've run. And maybe that's one reason we worship - to say thanks for the faith God has shown in us. To let ourselves look at God and to let God look back at us. And to laugh, and sing, and be delighted because God has called us his own.

#4125

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Hugh Ross' Extra-dimensional Deity

HUGH ROSS’ EXTRA-DIMENSIONAL DEITY

William L. Craig

Marietta, GA

wlcraig@compuserve. com

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Hugh Ross is evangelicalism’s most important scientific apologist. An astronomer by training, Dr. Ross is the founder and president of "Reasons to Believe," an organization devoted both to evangelism within the broader context of scientific apologetics and to the task of healing the cultural rift among Christians between science and religion. He has vigorously defended scientifically the cosmological and teleological arguments for a Creator and Designer of the universe and has championed progressive creationism over against naturalistic accounts of biological evolution on the one hand and so-called "young earth" creationism on the other. Though a tireless promoter of "Reasons to Believe," one measure of Dr. Ross’s humility is his unsolicited promotion of the materials of other authors, including this reviewer, in the organization’s catalogue. It has been my privilege to share the platform with Dr. Ross in a number of university and church outreaches, and I enthusiastically support his work.

I offer these accolades lest this review of Ross’s most recent book "Beyond the Cosmos" strike some as excessively critical. But I am convinced that Ross’s attempts to invest the (possible) extra-dimensionality of the universe with profound theological significance is misguided and that a corrective is in order. In his book Ross advises that "careful scholarship, meticulously reviewed, offers a vital safeguard" against heresy (p. 58). I wholeheartedly concur, and I have been mystified by evangelicals’ apparently uncritical acquiescence to some of the positions advocated by Ross in this book. For I believe that the errors in "Beyond the Cosmos" are many and that some of them, at least, are serious.

Ross’s basic tenet in "Beyond the Cosmos" is that certain physicists’ suggestion that in addition to the four familiar spatio-temporal dimensions there exist six (compacted) spatial dimensions carries with it enormous theological freight, shedding dramatic new light on doctrines of the Trinity, the incarnation, predestination, perseverance, the problem of evil, and so forth. Such extra-dimensional theories, in Ross’s view, suggest that God also exists extra-dimensionally, which affords Him access to our four-dimensional realm in ways unanticipated by human beings.

Now in one sense it is a commonplace of traditional theology that God exists extra-dimensionally in that He transcends both time and space, and theology had neither to await nor to thank modem science for that insight. A charitable reading of Beyond the Cosmos might be that Ross simply means to affirm God’s transcendence -- His timelessness and spacelessness -- , inspired by the analogy of spatial dimensions beyond the three we experience. In his final chapter, he says, "Extra dimensions are simply new terms to describe truths that have been known for as long as God has been known by any human" (p. 207). In several places Ross adds qualifying expressions which might be interpreted to indicate that God’s extra-dimensionality is metaphorical. For example, he speaks of "the existence of extra dimensions or the functional equivalent of extra dimensions "(p. 20, my emphasis). He explains, "... the cause (Causer) of the universe operates in a dimension of time or its equivalent (that is, maintains some attribute, capacity, super-dimensionality, or supra-dimensionality that permits the equivalent of cause and effect operations) completely independent of ours" (p. 23). This is the clearest statement of what it is for something to be the functional equivalent of an extra dimension, and it suggests that divine extra-dimensionality need not be taken literally, but may simply be a metaphor for God’s ability to act immanently in creation while transcending it or for His timelessness and spacelessness (supra-dimensionality). If this charitable interpretation is correct, talk of the modem discovery of God’s extra-dimension-ality may be written down to a combination of theological naivete and scientific over-exuberance, and the only corrective in order is that Ross needs to explain the metaphorical nature of his language clearly in his lectures to popular audiences, in which the crucial qualifications are typically neither made nor explained. Otherwise he does his audience a serious disservice when he asserts that traditional Christian doctrines are logically inconsistent unless formulated in more than four dimensions -- a terribly misleading way of affirming that Christian doctrines entail the transcendence of God.

Unfortunately, I fear that the above interpretation may be too charitable, that Ross does, in fact, conceive of God as literally existing in extra spatio-temporal dimensions. Ross could not be more explicit in his rejection of divine timelessness:

My choice of the word timeful to describe God’s time-related

capacities deliberately contradicts a notion that much of the

church has held and taught for many centuries, the notion of a

‘timeless’ eternity as the realm where God lives and where we

will live someday also (p. 65).2

Singling out Augustine and Aquinas as proponents of this doctrine, Ross exclaims, "... rare indeed is the student or professor who dares to challenge the doctrine of God’s dwelling in a timeless eternity" (p. 66), as Ross evidently means to do. In his view, God "must possess at least one more time dimension (or some attribute, capacity, super-dimension or supra-dimension that encompasses all the properties of time.... The Creator’s capacities include at least two, perhaps more, time dimensions" (pp. 23-24). God is thus a temporal being which exists in at least one additional dimension of time to the one we experience. Less explicit, but strongly implied is the view that God also exists spatially. Ross frequently speaks of God’s "operating" in ten dimensions of space, which a defender of divine spacelessness might reasonably construe to mean that God, though transcending space, produces effects in space. But this is evidently not Ross’s meaning. For he thinks of God accessing our four-dimensional realm from higher dimensions, just as a three-dimensional being can access a two-dimensional realm from the third dimension (pp. 74-79, 89-95). Thus, he says that God "exists and operates in several spatial dimensions beyond our three" (p. 24); "God.., lives and operates in the equivalent of at least eleven dimensions of space and time" (p. 33); "... His space or other dimensions give Him a complete view of us, inside and out" (p. 132); by contrast, "... we lack God’s extra-dimensional perspective to look directly upon ‘the thoughts and intents of the heart"' (p. 158). It is difficult to avoid the interpretation that God literally exists in higher spatial dimensions which afford Him access to our three-dimensional space.

Consider then Ross's account of divine eternity and its relationship to time. While I agree that God ought to be thought of as temporal since the moment of creation, Ross's account of God's temporality strikes me as multiply flawed and inadequately motivated. To deal with the second point first, Ross rejects divine timelessness because such a doctrine would imply that God "exists where causes and effects do not happen, and this idea contradicts biblical teachings" (p. 66). In what has to be the most whopping understatement in the whole book, Ross muses, "To be fair, Augustine and Aquinas probably did not see the connection between time and cause and effect to the degree that people in contemporary society do" (p. 66)! That no doubt has something to do with the fact that Augustine and Aquinas were not positivistic reductionists, as twentieth century physicists and philosophers of space and time have tended to be. Ross himself subscribes to some sort of causal theory of time: "Time is defined by the operation of cause-and-effect phenomena" (p. 66). He gives no justification for this controversial view.3 Indeed, I think that such a definition is obviously incorrect. We can imagine a world in which occasionalism is true: God recreates the world anew at each successive instant so that there are no cause-effect relations between phenomena in the world. Such a world seems obviously possible; in fact some Christians (like Malebranche) believed occasionalism is true. So causation is not a necessary condition of time. Neither is it obviously a sufficient condition. On Ross's conception of time, why could God not timelessly cause the whole space-time manifold with all the events in it to exist? Ross gives no answer. Moreover, even if God is temporal subsequent to His creation of the world, what about God existing sans the world? Could He not be timeless in such a state?

As for the first point, Ross's account of God's temporality is problematic.4 His answer to the problem of God and the beginning of time is to postulate a second time dimension, a sort of hypertime, in which God exists and created the world. Now we need to be very clear as to what a hyper-time would be. It would be a succession of hypermoments at each of which our entire time dimension exists.

[Figure 1 At successive moments of hyper-time T, our entire time series t exists]

But Dr. Ross misconstrues the nature of hyper-time, representing God's time on his diagram by a line parallel, rather than perpendicular, to our time dimension (p. 62).

[Figure 2 An Uncreated God in Two Time Dimensions]

What this implies is that God's temporal dimension is really the same as ours, only that He pre-exists for infinite time prior to the creation of the universe. It is, in effect, a Newtonian view of God and time. Now I certainly agree that God could have existed in absolute time prior to the inception of physical time at the Big Bang. But the proper distinction to be drawn here is not between two dimensions of time (since they are not perpendicular, but linear), but between metaphysical time and our empirical measures thereof. God can be temporal without anything spatial or physical existing if we are talking about metaphysical time. But postulating an infinite metaphysical time prior to the creation of the world fails to win any of the advantages Ross perceives, for it raises new, difficult questions of its own: How could God traverse an actually infinite number of equal, non-zero, past temporal intervals to arrive at the moment of creation? What reason could God have for delaying for infinite time His creation of the world?

Even postulating a hyper-tirne fails to avoid such questions, for we may ask the same questions all over again about whether hypertime has a beginning or not. In two places Ross suggests that the two dimensions of time may have the geometry of the surface of a hemisphere.

[Figure 3 God's Operations in a Sphere of Time]

In such a representation our time is the latitudinal line and God's time is the longitudinal lines. (A curious feature of this model is that it is our time which is the hyper-time in which God's time is embedded, not vice versa. For there is one line of our time, but many timelines for God. Since these are timelines which endure through moments of our hypertime, they cannot also represent lines of divine causal influence, as Ross suggests. Moreover, it is incorrect to situate God only at the pole, for this would treat His time as the embedding hyper-time; in fact He would exist at all points along His longitudinal time lines.) This conception avoids both the infinitude of our past as well as a beginning of our time only at the expense of making time circular, a conception contradictory to the JudaeoChristian conception of the linearity of time. In any case, the postulation of a hyper-time of any sort appears to preclude the reality of tense and temporal becoming, since at each hyper-instant our whole time line exists. Time is, in effect, "spatialized," and the distinction between past, present, and future becomes a subjective illusion of human consciousness. This is a high price to pay for so problematic and extravagant a hypothesis, which is not implied by any of the extra-dimensional theories surveyed by Ross.

In one place Dr. Ross suggests that the postulation of a hypertime helps to answer a third-grader's question about how God can listen to a billion prayers at once. Not only does Ross seem to get his answer backwards (he, in effect, turns our time into a hypertime above time instead of saying God has infinitely many hyper-instants at which to listen to each prayer in succession), but his answer dreadfully depreciates divine omniscience. Rather than cast God anthropomorphically as a cognitively limited, hyper-dimensional telephone operator, Ross should have explained to his third-grade friend that just as a super-computer can do millions of operations at once, God is infinitely more intelligent than a super-computer and so His lines can never get jammed!

Issues concerning divine eternity are difficult and perhaps not too close to the heart of orthodoxy. When it comes to divine spatiality, however, the problems become more serious. The unwelcome implication of Ross's view is that God is a spatial entity; more than that, He is (at least) a three-dirnensionally existing entity as we are. This conclusion follows from the fact that if an entity exists in any dimension of a multidimensional space-time manifold, then it exists in all of them. Consider a point existing in a three-dimensional manifold. The point exists in all three dimensions of the manifold: it has height, length, and depth coordinates which specify its location. One of Ross's most fundamental and surprising errors is his apparent assumption that God can exist only in higher dimensional realms without also existing in our space-time dimensions. He asserts, "Each of the four space-time dimensions of the physical universe is independent of the others" (p. 15). This sentence is jarring because the central insight behind Minkowski's notion of space-time is that space and time are not independent of each other but together comprise a single four-dimensional geometry called "space-time." Admittedly Ross has an idiosyncratic definition of independence: "This independence means that each dimension always must be exactly perpendicular ... to all the other dimensions ..." (p. 15). But even on this peculiar understanding of what it means to be independent, Ross's own diagram illustrates that an entity which exists in one dimension of a manifold exists in all of them.

[Figure 4 Dependent versus Independent Dimensions]

Object E, though not intersecting the axis C, is nevertheless clearly located in the dimension represented by C, for it has a location with respect to C, namely, the point where B and C intersect. Thus, E exists in both the B and C dimensions. This entails that God exists somewhere in our universe. But that occasions very troubling questions. Is He located at some point in distant space where we could reach Him via space travel? Is God spatially extended? Is He spread out everywhere like the invisible ether of nineteenth century physics? It is not enough merely to answer "No," to these questions; Ross owes us some account of how the biblical God can be a spatio-temporal entity, as his view entails.

Ross thinks that by positing God's existence in higher spatial dimensions, he can make sense of God's invisibility and proximity.5 He claims that "God is hidden from us in the sense that we cannot make contact with Him through our five senses" (p. 72). But this is a clearly deficient conception of God's spirituality and incorporeality, for it leaves open the view that God is a spatial object which is simply undetectable by our senses. As for God's proximity to us, Ross seems to interpret biblical passages like "The Lord is close to the brokenhearted," in terms of literal contiguity, when the sense of nearness at issue here is clearly relational, having to do with intimacy, not contiguity! In any case, any advantages in terms of God's proximity to us thought to accrue from divine extradimensionality can also be had via divine spacelessness, without the added problem of threatening to make God a spatial entity.

Now, Ross thinks that postulating divine extra-dimensionality serves to shed new light on traditional theological problems. Take, for example, the doctrine of the Trinity. Ross claims that the doctrine of the Trinity preserved in the Christian creeds is a paradox -- that is, an "apparent contradiction" (p. 89, cf. p. 53). But Ross believes that extra-dimensionality can help to resolve seemingly contradictory statements. He considers the following conjunction of two statements: "Triangles cannot be circles, and triangles can be circles." Ross does not seem to appreciate the fact that not only are these statements contradictories, but the second conjunct alone is broadly logically impossible. Ross asserts that in three dimensions the second conjunct is true because a triangle can be rotated about an axis to form a cone, which may be analyzed as a stack of circles. But surely the correct response to this thought experiment is that a triangle is not a cone (not to mention that a cone is not a circle)! Moreover, even if we admitted the second conjunct were true, that would do nothing to resolve the original problem, for then the first conjunct would be false. When Ross says, "... the truth of both statements ... can be recognized" (p. 56), what he leaves us with is not a resolution, but an antimony.

Ross asserts that "The charge that 'Trinitarians' accept a mathematical absurdity would seem appropriate ... if the biblical God were confined to the same dimensional realm as humans" (p. 82). This amounts to saying that a denial of God's extradimensionality is a sufficient condition of the doctrine of the Trinity's being a logical absurdity. I take this to be an enormously serious allegation, for it implies that Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin and other champions of Trinitarian doctrine, who did not believe in God's extra-dimensionality as Ross understands it, were all advocating a logical incoherence and that anyone accepting the doctrine of the Trinity was believing a logical contradiction. In fact, however, Ross never shows how the traditional formulations of the Trinity are even apparently contradictory. There is not even the appearance of contradiction in affirming that "There is one only and true God, but in the unity of the Godhead there are three eternal and coequal Persons" (p. 88, citing Ryne). If there were a contradiction, positing God's existence in extra spatial dimensions would not solve it. At best, then, Ross appeals to extra-dimensionality only to illustrate how three can be one. But as an illustration of the Trinity, Ross' scenario of a three-dimensional hand intersecting a two-dimensional surface seems no more adequate than the well-known, deficient illustrations he criticizes. When flatlanders see the finger of the hand intersecting their plane in different ways. "They might never discern that the six-plus manifestations were all governed by one entity and one source of operation" (p. 93). But this amounts to an illustration of modalism, not the Trinity. Later Ross imagines the flatlanders seeing the several intersections of the hand's fingers with their plane, commenting, "The twoness, threeness, or moreness of our hand (or one aspect of that plurality) they could imagine, but not the oneness" (p. 95). But the fingers are merely parts of the one hand, and Ross himself earlier quoted from the Augsburg Confession that "... the term 'person' is used, as the ancient Fathers employed it in this connection, to signify not a part or a quality in another but that which subsists of itself." The hand-flatland illustration thus only succeeds in illustrating modalism or one thing's having three parts. It certainly does not make the Trinity more intelligible.

Ross also believes that God's extra-dimensionality serves to illumine Christology. Unfortunately, although Ross clearly affirms that Jesus is both God and man, it may be justifiably doubted whether he affirms the Chalcedonian fonnula of two natures united in one person. For example, he does not describe the incarnation as the second person of the Trinity's taking on a human nature in addition to his divine nature, but as God's literally turning Himself into a human being:

... the second person of the triune God, the Creator of all

angels and of the entire universe, actually became a man.... God

supernaturally entered the womb of a virgin (Mary). How He

interacted with or modified Mary's egg is not made clear in

Scripture, but He became a flesh and blood embryo (p. 104).

This remarkable statement suggests that Ross stands in the Alexandrian tradition of one-nature Christology. Such a conception seems to require God's relinquishing some of His divine attributes in becoming a man, and this is just what Ross affirms:

In coming to Earth as an embryo in the virgin's womb, Christ

'emptied' Himself, leaving behind the extra-dimensional realm and

capacities He shared with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.

When He had completed the work He set out to do, the work of

redemption, He returned to the place and the powers He had left

behind (p. 49).

This passage constitutes an endorsement of kenotic theology, which interprets Christ's self-emptying as the divestiture of certain divine attributes. Now this sort of non-Chalcedonian, kenotic Christology seems to me a very serious aberration. As the Antiochean theologians realized, if Christ had only a single "theanthropic" nature, then he was in fact neither God nor man, but a sort of hybrid of the two. Kenotic theology faces the severe difficulty of how it is that God can give up His attributes, since any being lacking such attributes as omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, aseity, and so forth, by definition is not God. As is typical chez kenotic theologians, Ross would preserve Christ's deity by means of the continuity of his moral attributes: "Jesus' divine identity as God, His character, wisdom, purity, and motives, remained perfectly intact, but He voluntarily relinquished the independent use of His divine attributes and His extra-dimensional capacities" (pp. 103104). Consistency requires us to say, then, that attributes such as omniscience, omnipresence, and so forth, are not in fact essential to God's nature, that in some possible worlds God is weak, ignorant, spatially confined, and so forth. This seems to me an extraordinarily high price to pay for any supposed benefits thought to accrue from the kenotic approach.

Ross's non-Chalcedonian Christology leads to a bizarre view of the atonement. Traditionally Jesus is understood to have died in his human nature, but his divine nature is, of course, incapable of perishing. But if Christ has only a single nature, then his death is literally the death of God. Thus, in a section entitled "God Both Dead and Alive" Ross seems to affirm precisely what the title states.

Some skeptics and atheists have argued that if Jesus were God, He could not have died; and if He died, He could not have been God. They recognize, of course, the contradiction in saying that Jesus is both really dead and really alive.... The simultaneity of Jesus' death and immortality would only be a contradiction, however, if the time, place, and context of His death were identical to the time, place and dimensional context of His being alive.... Because of Christ's identity as God and His access to all the dimensions or superdimensions God encompasses, He could experience suffering and death in all the human-occupied dimensions and then transition into any of His other dimensions or realms once the atonement price had been paid (pp. 108-109).

Here Ross does seem to affirm that God was both dead and alive, but that that contradiction is avoided by extra-dimensionality. But this escape does not seem to work. For Ross had clearly affirmed that in the incarnation God the Son had left the extra-dimensional realms and capacities he shared with the Father and the Spirit. Thus, if he died in our human realm, God died. How he could then transition back to extra-dimensional realms once he had died seems inexplicable. In any case the logical problem here is not just God's being both dead and alive, but God's being dead, period. By definition, God cannot perish. But without a two natures Christology, we are forced to affirm the absurdity that God died.

Extra-dimensionality leads Ross into even more bizarre speculations about the atonement in answer to the question of how one man's death could pay for all people's sins. Instead of answering that question in terms of the dignity of Christ's person, he hypothesizes that perpendicular to our time dimension is another dimension composed of billions of separate time lines on each of which Christ suffers death and subsequent isolation from God for infinite time (p. 112):

[Figure 5 Paying the Atonement Price in Multiple Dimensions of Time]

I find this speculation profoundly unacceptable. It requires, in effect, billions of Christs, thus destroying Christ's personal identity. For it is a distinct person who dies on the cross in each of these time lines. Moreover, each of these "Christs" suffers separation from God endlessly with no hope of resurrection and victory at the end. That Christ rises in our temporal dimension is the exception to the rule; the other Christs remain separated from God forever, which makes a mockery of Jesus's triumph over death.

Ross also makes a curious suggestion concerning Jesus's resurrection appearances: in disappearing from view, Jesus "rotated" each of his three spatial dimensions into a fourth, fifth, and sixth spatial dimension respectively (pp. 46-47). Jesus's resurrection body thus literally came apart and became three one-dimensional lines -- not a very robust conception of a body!

Ross also thinks that extra-dimensionality will help to resolve the conflict between divine sovereignty and human freedom, but a reading of the relevant chapters makes clear that most of what he says has little to do with extra-dimensionality, focusing instead on the relative strength of God's influence on us as we draw near to or retreat from Him. When he finally gets down to reconciling sovereignty and freedom, what he winds up with is, in effect, if he is to avoid determinism by our circumstances, a middle knowledge account of providence (pp. 153-154). But such an account owes nothing to extra-dimensionality.

With respect to doctrine of salvation, Ross's diagrams on pp. 161, 162 seem to betray the Reformation doctrine of sola fide, for they show a non-Christian gradually increasing in "Christlikeness" until he irrevocably crosses the "salvation threshold." Even if we interpret this increase to be the result of God's prevenient work, it is still surely false that salvation is achieved by a non-Christian's growing more Christlike until he crosses the line of no return and is saved.

In the remainder of his book, Ross treats such issues as perseverance, the problem of evil, and hell; but his insights on these questions do not involve essential reference to extra-dimensionality.

In short, while appreciative of Ross's work in other areas, I find his attempt to construe God as existing in hyper-dimensions of time and space and to interpret Christian doctrines in that light to be both philosophically and theologically unacceptable. I am sure that Ross did not realize some of the implications of the positions he took in "Beyond the Cosmos." He needs now either to explain why his views do not have such implications or else to modify his views so as to avoid them.

__________________

Endnotes

1. In personal conversation Dr. Ross has told me that he felt that the crucial qualifications were made in the book and that our differences were "just semantic." But even after our conversation it is still unclear to me how literally he takes God's extra-dimensionality. He clearly believes that there are six additional spatial dimensions, and he seems to think that God actually inhabits these. He insisted in conversation that God is not confined to ten dimensions but can exist in as many dimensions as one can imagine. But my critique is not aimed at God's being confined to extra dimensions, but is rather lodged against the claim that God literally exists in spatio-temporal dimensions, and Ross's response only reinforces one's suspicion that Ross believes God literally to exist in such dimensions. Similarly, his insistence to me that God's extra-dimensionality is merely a possible solution to the problems he addresses, rather than the actual fact of the matter, shows that he is taking extra-dimensionality literally, for divine transcendence could not be so characterized. Perhaps the problem here is that Ross does not appreciate that the classical doctrine of omnipresence entails God's transcending space altogether, while being cognizant of and causally effective at every point in space. In any case, I am absolutely confident that lay audiences who hear him do not understand him to be speaking metaphorically, so if that is his intention, he needs to affirm clearly that God does not literally exist and operate in extra dimensions of space and time.

2. It should be noted that the classical doctrine of divine timelessness holds that it is impossible for any creature, even angels, to share in God's timeless eternity.

3. In personal conversation, Dr. Ross told me that he is merely adopting the common scientific understanding of time in order to communicate effectively with the type of person he is trying to reach. Such people think that God's timelessness implies that God is causally inactive. Ross' response is apparently intended to show such persons that God is not timeless in that sense. This strikes me as very odd apologetic strategy: rather than correct the person's misunderstandings, one instead formulates a view of God's eternity which is compatible with the person's misconceptions but which we know to be literally false. Thus our unbelieving friend is led to become a Christian at the expense of his accepting beliefs which we know to be wrong, i.e., believing literally what we understand to be merely metaphorical, viz., that God exists in some sort of hypertime.

4. Notice here that whether literal or metaphorical, Ross's account of God's relationship to time is confused and theologically unacceptable.

5. Again, notice that in what follows Ross's account is problematic theologically, whether we construe it literally or metaphorically. He just has an incorrect understanding of divine proximity, the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, etc.

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Moments of Wonder

Romans 1:20

Moments of wonder are important.

Important to have. On a recent trip to Russia a friend told me of such a moment. He was walking the streets of St. Petersburg in the evening. A light and peaceful snow began to fall, the kind where large snowflakes mutely fill the sky. In the distance he caught sight of a many-spiraled Russian Orthodox Cathedral piercing the snow-filled night. Transfixed, he walked towards it.

Leaving a busy street, the passersby became few, and soon the snow accounted for all the sound. A calm and currentless river ran alongside the cathedral — appropriate, my friend thought, “the snow enwrapped the air about the cathedral in peace and the river, another form of water, irenically framed the cathedral.” Bright floodlights illumined the almost fantastic cathedral, and in so doing made beams of lighted snow in the darkened sky. Snowflakes gracefully drifted in and out of the beams of light, heightening the wonder of the scene. The street was empty save for my awe-filled friend. Drinking with his eyes, he nourished his soul on the peace, on the profundity, on the beauty.

Indeed, moments of wonder are important. Not just because they enrich the soul, but also because they serve as reminders, pointers to something beyond, something beyond the pressing details of life. They point to transcendence. And yet, these moments can leave us with more than a fuzzy sense of there being something more to life — if we have the eyes to see it.

You see, in wonder, we can discover hints of purpose, of meaning, of mind — and find these all in proportions and in depths greater than ourselves. We can be confronted with the profound sense that our world is not just matter, energy, and chance — that happenstance didn't bring about the cathedral draped in snow. And our eyes can see what the Apostle Paul declares in his letter to the Romans: that creation proclaims the glory of God. Writes Paul, “For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)

Truly, it is our natural tendency to become trapped into our own purposes, our own mind. But moments of wonder can give us a brief glimpse of reality, a glimpse of what our eyes were meant to see: the eternal power and divine nature of God. And such eyesight awakened can make us sensitive once again to the presence and glory of a God who is very much among us.

Indeed, God is here! He is present and active in all of creation, in all of our moments. Dear friend, when we behold that reality, we behold the greatest wonder of all. And with the Psalmist we too, can take delight in seeing clearly: “The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it.” (Psalm 24:1)

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #13236]

In the Midst of Smoke and Talk

John 8:58

“There are two tragedies in life,” noted Oscar Wilde. “One is not getting what you want. The other is getting it.” INDEED. We get what we want, and we are left longing for more, for it never seems to satisfy, does it?

What is it we want? TRANSCENDENCE. As mere humans, we long to connect to something beyond ourselves, or escape our boredom and pain. And in this search, the metaphor of the market often serves as the exclusive image for guiding our thinking. “All paths to transcendence are equally valuable,” we are told, and so any one will do, as long as it works for you and doesn't do harm to others. One path may lead one to God; another, to whatever provides escape and meaning.

Religious experience, then, is understood by many as a means of self-fulfillment — what the individual gets out of it — not whether there is “another” who is “outer” and “other” than ourselves. In this way, religion is domesticated, trivialized, and simply co-opted for personal and private use. It is what sociologist Os Guinness describes as a faith that is “privately engaging but socially irrelevant.”

Yet there is One who stands outside and above, proclaiming “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). His voice disturbs us because He does not speak the language of the market, nor for that matter, of this world. Rather, He calls us to lay everything at His feet and to worship Him — and to worship Him because He is who He is, HOLY OTHER. This is the God we see in the Scriptures, and it is the Christ we encounter in the Gospels.

In fact, God reveals himself to Moses as “I AM WHO I AM,” and Jesus reiterates this phrase seven times in the Gospel of John. “I am the bread of life,” he declares in John 6, and in John 8, “I am the light of the world.” At the end of Jesus' sermon in John 8, we read, “'I tell you the truth,' Jesus answered, 'before Abraham was born, I am!'” Then John comments, “At this, they picked up stones to stone him” (John 8:58-59). Why did the people want to stone him? Because Jesus declared that he is not only the fulfillment of all our hungers, but even more, he is the fulfillment of all THAT IS. He is the Eternal One, Truth Incarnate.

Theologian David Wells comments:

Christ is not an agitator. He offers no new, intense

experiences. He does not sell anything. He IS, and that is all

— like a flower on the restaurant table in the midst of the smoke

and the talk. This is not what everybody else is promising

today. In the advertisements... in the new spiritual movements

the message is clear — we have exactly what you have been looking

for! Here is the answer to all your questions! [...] This

simplification turns everyone into nothing more than a shallow

consumer. Christ is not for consumption but for worship.(1)

O, that may we lay everything at his feet and worship Him who is Holy Other.

________

1. David Wells, TURNING TO GOD: BIBLICAL CONVERSION IN THE MODERN WORLD (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1989), 128.

Danielle DuRant is research assistant at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #25416]

The Polemic Shot In the Foot

Some time ago I was speaking at a university in England, when a rather exasperated person in the audience made his attack upon God.

"There cannot possibly be a God," he said, "with all the evil and suffering that exists in the world!"

I asked, "When you say there is such a thing as evil, are you not assuming that there is such a thing as good?"

"Of course," he retorted.

"But when you assume there is such a thing as good, are you not also assuming that there is such a thing as a moral law on the basis of which to distinguish between good and evil?"

"I suppose so," came the hesitant and much softer reply.

"If, then, there is a moral law," I said, "you must also posit a moral law giver. But that is who you are trying to disprove and not prove. If there is no transcendent moral law giver, there is no absolute moral law. If there is no moral law, there really is no good. If there is no good there is no evil. I am not sure what your question is!"

There was silence and then he said, "What, then, am I asking you?"

He was visibly jolted that at the heart of his question lay an assumption that contradicted his own conclusion.

You see friends, the skeptic not only has to give an answer to his or her own question, but also has to justify the question itself. And even as the laughter subsided I reminded him that his question was indeed reasonable, but that his question justified my assumption that this was a moral universe. For if God is not the author of life, neither good nor bad are meaningful terms.

This seems to constantly elude the critic who thinks that by raising the question of evil, a trap has been sprung to destroy theism. When in fact, the very raising of the question ensnares the skeptic who raised the question. A hidden assumption comes into the open. Moreover, as C. S. Lewis reminds us, the moment we acknowledge something as being "better", we are committing ourselves to an objective point of reference.

The disorienting reality to those who raise the problem of evil is that the Christian can be consistent when he or she talks about the problem of evil, while the skeptic is hard-pressed to respond to the question of good in an amoral universe. In short, the problem of evil is not solved by doing away with the existence of God; the problem of evil and suffering must be resolved while keeping God in the picture.

__________________

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Creators, Cures, and Nooses

Do you believe in a Creator of the universe? Stop, don't answer too quickly for your answer, either yes or no, will make great demands upon you. Indeed, the existence or non-existence of the Creator is not a premise that sits on its hands, and just lets you live your life, without the interference of its import.

Richard Weaver, the influential author, taught us that ideas have consequences. Likewise, beliefs have consequences. What you believe about the world does not change the character of reality, but it does fundamentally orient how you are in the world. So be careful what you believe – your world depends on it.

So do you believe in the Creator? The consequence in answering yes is that your life cannot with impunity be lived solely according to your wishes, your desires, your aims. For if there is a Creator, than your Creator has the prerogative to make demands upon you, who you are, and what you become. In the most terrifying sense, you are accountable for your choices.

The consequence for answering no is the reverse: you become unaccountable. Transcendent reference points are lost and the quagmire of immanence befalls. Yes, if there's no Creator, the ultimate bounds upon your freedom are knocked down, but without boundaries freedom becomes a noose. Just read Sartre, or Camus, or Beckett to discover this. The first of these, Sartre, was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and he disbelieved in a Creator. He also believed that the first question of philosophy was, “Why not commit suicide?” These two beliefs are connected. Unbounded freedom is a noose.

Don't mistake me, bounded freedom is not a cake-walk. Just read the Dutch philosopher Soren Kierkegaard to see this. He wrestled with the profound truth that the Creator's demands upon us are not light. In fact, he entitled his work contemplating God's demands, The Sickness Unto Death. He believed, if taken seriously, the demands of the Creator upon us should cause such anxiety as to produce a sickness unto death; for the demands of a just God are too weighty for our human frailties and shortcomings. He was right. But he was also a Christian, and so he believed that another had already born his sickness unto death, and won a cure for his soul.

Christ has born our sickness unto death. That is the meaning of the cross. And the meaning of the resurrection is that he has won your cure. Believe and be healed.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #12330]

Does Beauty Transcend? [2 Versions]

Master Violinist Joshua Bell emerged from the Metro and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript-a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money and began to play.

For the next 45 minutes, in the D.C. Metro on January 12, 2007, Bell played Mozart and Schubert as over 1,000 people streamed by, most hardly taking notice. If they would have, they might have recognized the young man for the world-renowned violinist he is. They also may have noted the violin he played - a rare Stradivari worth over $3 million. It was all part of a project arranged by The Washington Post - ”an experiment in context, perception, and priorities-as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste. In a banal setting, at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”

Just three days earlier, Joshua Bell sold out Boston Symphony Hall, with ordinary seats going for $100. In the subway, Bell garnered about $32 from the 27 people who stopped long enough to give a donation.

________

Source: Preaching Today

==================================

Another version, adapted from an email sent by Jack Hammell of Ledgewood Baptist Church (NJ):

In Washington , D.C., at a Metro subway station on a cold January morning in 2007, a man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, 1,097 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After about 3 minutes a middle-aged man noticed that there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, and then he hurried on to meet his schedule.

About 4 minutes later the violinist received his first dollar. A woman threw money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk. At 6 minutes a young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

At 10 minutes: A 3-year old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head the whole time. This action was repeated by several other children, but every parent - without exception - forced their children to move on quickly.

The musician played continuously for 45 minutes. Only seven people had stopped and listened for a short while. About twenty gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The musician collected a total of $32.17.

He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed and no one applauded. There was no recognition at all.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world.[*] He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a Stradivarius violin worth almost $4 million. Three days before, Joshua Bell sold-out a theater in Boston where the audience paid an average of $100 to sit and listen to him play the same music.

This is a true story. Joshua Bell, playing incognito in the D.C. Metro Station, was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities.

This experiment raised several questions:

* In a common-place environment, at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty?

* If so, do we stop to appreciate it?

* Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made..... how many other things are we missing, as we rush through life?

________

Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his article on this experiment, which had been secretly videotaped.

[*] Actually, one bystander did recognize him.

*

[see also HolwickID #35385]

[Original illustration at this number was deleted for being obsolete]

The Question of Tongues

Joel 2:28

Sermon series on Questions People Ask 1 Corinthians 14:1-19

THE QUESTION OF TONGUES

=======================

I. Strange prayer.

II. The fastest-growing movement in Christianity.

A. It began on the Day of Pentecost, A.D. 30.

B. Typical in Third World, even among Baptists.

C. Controversial.

III. We all have a desire for transcendence.

A. Transcendence: breaking through to the presence of God.

B. Tongues offers a direct link to God.

C. Only solution - what does the Bible say?

IV. Ecstasy in the Bible.

A. Saul and the school of prophets. 1 Samuel 10:5-12

B. Jesus' prediction of tongues(?) Mark 16:17

C. The original Pentecost. Acts 2

D. A sign of the end. Joel 2:28-32 / Acts 2:17-21

V. Further information in 1 Corinthians.

A. Tongues are only mentioned by Paul because of problems.

B. Passed away with perfection? Not yet. 1 Cor 13:8-10

C. Tongues have strict limits within church worship.

VI. The place for tongues.

A. Private devotions.

B. Special missionary setting?

C. Tongues in church? In a BAPTIST church?

VII. However we speak to God, He wants to speak to us!

A. God speaks to our hearts through our minds.

B. Genuine fellowship and prayer can bring us transcendence.

C. Have you had this experience?

Emperors and Promises

Exodus 3:14

God makes promises. For those who grew up with the Bible stories in which God makes covenants with ancient Israel such a statement does not seem strange. But think about it for a moment. God, the Supreme Being in the universe, the Creator, the all-powerful, stepping into human history and making pacts with a particular people.

Maybe an analogy would help capture the peculiarities of this notion. Take the great Roman Empire of antiquity, which ruled the Mediterranean with an awesome military that squelched all adversaries. Let's say that the Roman Emperor decided that he wanted to get involved in the local economy of Nazareth, a no-where town, no walls, no defenses, just a humble hamlet in the Galilean countryside. Do you think it strange for the Roman Emperor to send emissaries to entreat the Nazarenes into signing a trade agreement? Yes, that sounds crazy. The Roman Emperor would demand the Nazarenes be subject to him and give him tribute. Roman Emperors don’t make pacts with Nazarenes.

But God does — as ancient Judaism tells it. The Emperor of the universe makes agreements with the little folks. Strange, yet beautiful.

Transcendently, Yahweh declares, “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14), yet immanently Yahweh comes near. He came near to Moses at the burning bush, and in a cloud of fire He stayed near to the people of Israel as He led them out of bondage in Egypt. Then he met with them on Mt. Sinai and made a covenant with them. Be my people and I will be your God, He said. And you will enjoy my blessings, the blessings of my presence.

As a Christian, I believe, that God came nearer still in the form of a man, Jesus Christ. That is, that a Nazarene came to us to be involved in the economy of our lives. He came to make a covenant, and to bring the promises of His good graces. This is the wonder of the Christian faith: the Emperor of the universe comes near to be involved with us. And involve us in His Kingdom. A kingdom, which will endure beyond Rome and all such earthly empires.

____________

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Remember Who You Are and Whose You Are

Luke 22:19

In his book THE SWANN'S WAY, the French novelist Marcel Proust wrote of returning home late one evening on a dull winter day when he faced the prospect of a depressing tomorrow. The maid greeted him and, seeing that he was tired, brought him a cup of hot tea and some cake. Being both tired and depressed he at first refused them. Only at her insistence did he finally begin to drink the tea and eat the cake. Proust wrote that an unexplainable delight suddenly came over him. His anxieties and troubles seemed to vanish. Suddenly, he wrote, I had “ceased to feel mediocre, accidental and mortal.”

What caused this wonderful sensation to come over him? He was at a loss to explain it. How could a taste of tea and cake produce this feeling of peace? He drank and ate more but he still could not decipher the secret. The truth, he guessed, must be in himself and not in what he was eating and drinking.

Proust began to search within himself. Suddenly he began to remember. His mind carried him back to Combray, France, where in childhood he visited his Aunt and she feed him cake and hot tea. Proust had been unmoved by the sight of the tea and cake but the taste had sent shockwaves through him and reminded him of scenes long forgotten. Suddenly he remembered the little town, the village church, the old house, the long forgotten relatives, and the flowers in the garden. The tea and cake had recovered for Proust the memory and mystery of an existence long past.

Is it, indeed, possible to hand a person a cup of tea and say to that person: Now drink this and remember who you are? It not only is possible but we believe that in a real sense that is what we do when we partake of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. By partaking of the bread and wine we are seeking to recover the experience of salvation. Like the novelist Proust, it causes us to think back on experiences that happened long ago and in remembering these experiences we begin to recover our own sense of identity. In a haunting and mystical way the sacrament calls us to remember -- remember who we are and whose we are.

Come and See

Luke 4:15

Whether we are aware of it or not, the search for transcendence compels the direction of most of our lives. Surely the resurgence in spirituality, particularly in the West, reveals that each of us longs to be united to someone or something greater than ourselves. However, sometimes this search for transcendence is not necessarily embarked upon as a search for God, but rather an escape from our world.

Those who follow this religious path often investigate Buddhism, for its teachings claim to offer the follower the means to end suffering and desire through meditation and its disciplines. In fact, sojourners on this path attempt to rid themselves not only of the very human desire to be united to someone beyond ourselves, but even the very idea of the self. But can we really escape the reality that we are individuals, uniquely created to know love and to desire relationship? And moreover, is not the attempt to escape the shackles of our humanity in itself a desire?

This desire to escape is also voiced by many searching for “peak” experiences, whether through skydiving or another sexual encounter. Consider, for example, the world of extreme sports: It beckons the participant to take serious risks, conquer danger and pain, and in doing so, find something that is missing in everyday existence. And yet I am reminded of what I have heard my colleague Ravi Zacharias say on occasion. Says Ravi: “The loneliest moment in life is when you've just experienced the ultimate, and it's let you down.” Yes, we can go from peak experience to peak experience, but none last, and we are left longing for more.

So what — or who — is big enough to capture this longing for transcendence? Many people claim to have the answer, but few actually declare that THEY ARE the answer. Yet a carpenter son's did just that, and we encounter Him in the pages of the New Testament time and again beckoning us to come and to see.

Listen to these words about Jesus in Luke, chapter 4: “The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: 'The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.’ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, 'Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.'“

The enormity of Jesus' words! He had come “to proclaim freedom for the prisoners” and “to release the oppressed.” Yet he provides more than a way of escape. For in declaring, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” Jesus declares that he himself is the fulfillment of all that we long for.

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Talking With the Emperor

John 3:16

There is so much said now about people being offended at Christianity because it is so dark and gloomy. But the real reason why man is offended at Christianity is that it would make of a man something so extraordinary that he is unable to get it into his head.

Imagine the mightiest Emperor that ever lived; and imagine some poor peasant, who would think himself fortunate if he could but once catch a glimpse of the Emperor, and would tell his children and grandchildren of this as the most important event of his life. Suppose that the Emperor were to send for this man, who had not supposed that the Emperor knew of his existence, and informed him that he wished to have him as a son-in-law. In all probability, the peasant, instead of being delighted, would be offended, since he would suppose that this could mean only that the Emperor wanted to make a fool of him!

And now for Christianity! Christianity teaches that every man, say an ordinary man who would be quite proud of having once in his life talked with the King of Denmark, can talk with God any moment he wishes, and is sure to be heard by Him, that for this man's sake God came into the world to suffer and die. If anything would stun a man, surely it is this. Whoever has not the humble courage to believe it, must surely be offended by it.

________

(abridged from Kierkegaard's SICKNESS UNTO DEATH)

Undeceptions

John 9:25

The well-read collection of essays written by C.S. Lewis and compiled posthumously in the book GOD IN THE DOCK was originally published in England under a different title. The book was titled UNDECEPTIONS.

“Undeception” was the word Lewis used to describe a startling experience of awareness -- moments when deception is uncovered and the cause is seen clearly from within, moments when blind spots are replaced with reality. He was taken with these awakenings or undeceptions in many of the characters of Jane Austen. In much of Austen’s work, he observes, “[T]he undeception... is the very pivot or watershed of the story.”(1)

Lewis would unquestionably state the same of our own stories. “Undeception” was no doubt a word that fittingly described his startling experience of being brought into the kingdom kicking and screaming, the most reluctant convert in all England. It was that experience through which he saw himself, the world, and its Creator for the rest of his life.

Encountering God, we start to recognize our own blind spots. “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it” woke Jacob to his own deception (Gen. 28:16). He didn’t wake up declaring that the God who was once absent had now appeared. He said, “God was here all along and I was the one who didn’t see it.” A friend of mine refers to pivotal encounters like Jacob’s dream as “thin spots” -- moments in life where the nearness of God is nearly palpable. Other theologians describe such encounters as openings or baptisms or transcendence. Still others give testimonies similar to the man born blind in ancient Jerusalem. Forced to explain to the Pharisees the unexplainable moment he had with Jesus, he mustered the only words he could think to describe it: “Only one thing I do know. I was blind but now I see” (John 9:25).

In his book GRACE ABOUNDING, John Bunyan describes a day when he was inexplicably released from doubt and despair. While passing through a field, troubled in conscience and fearing that all was not right, the sentence fell upon his soul: “Thy righteousness is in heaven.” (See Psalm 85:11b). Writes Bunyan, “I thought I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God’s right hand. There was my righteousness. Wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me that I lacked his righteousness, for that was ever before Him. Moreover, I saw that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor my bad frame that made it worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself.”(2)

Not surprisingly, Bunyan’s encounter is one described in a small book recommended by Dallas Willard called DEEPER EXPERIENCES OF FAMOUS CHRISTIANS by James Lawson. In the book that was for him an experience of undeception, Willard notes the quality that moved him in each account of unmistakable, life-changing clarity. Lawson’s “famous Christians” were not seeking experiences of self-awareness or even experiences with God. They were seeking the Lord, his kingdom, and his holiness, and in seeking found it all.

This is not to be overlooked or seen as easy or even painless. A person that is willing to put even his or her vision of life into God’s hands, watching as He prepares a fearful concoction of spit and mud, is a soul that seeks Him with courage. Self-deception is a difficult thing to own up to, and far too often it is easier to see the deception in others than it is to see in ourselves. The blinders we walk with through life, God in his mercy must remove. Opening our reluctant eyes, He shows us with his radiance the darkness we’ve been squinting in, even as He prepares us to see.

In Bunyan and in Lewis, in the lives of Christians throughout history, the defining characteristic of their encounters with God was their willingness (even reluctant willingness) to see the deceptions within themselves and to bring these deceptions back to the feet of the one who made them visible. His love and mercy are to our lives the shining undeceptions that unwearyingly move us to see.

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1. C.S. Lewis, SELECTED LITERARY ESSAYS, “A Note on Jane Austen” Ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 178.

2. John Bunyan, GRACE ABOUNDING (New Kensington: Whitaker House, 1993), 135.

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No Eye Has Seen

1 Corinthians 2:9

I am fascinated by the close ties between our memories and our five senses. Sense experiences — smells, tastes, feelings, sounds, and sights — can bring to mind instantaneous recollections that would otherwise have lain dormant for a lifetime. When I lay my head down on a feather pillow, it reminds me of sleeping in my great-grandparents' house. When I hear the gentle strains of “Gesu Bambino,” I picture ballerinas at Christmastime. Every time I see my grandmother's sewing basket sitting beside my favorite chair, memories of her spring vividly to mind. The diesel fumes from a bus bring back clear recollections of school trips. The smell of a burning charcoal fire brings back tailgate parties and brisk fall weekends, and comfort foods of all varieties spark memories of home and holidays.

Our senses are not nearly so helpful when we try to imagine the future. Although my memories are full of vivid smells and sounds, my thoughts about the future contain, at best, recombinations of visual memories. The closest I can come to imagining what I will look like twenty or thirty years down the road is to impose my face on my mother's body. If you try to imagine the future spouse, children, or grandchildren you have never seen, there will probably be a foggy shadow over the face. When we try to imagine places we have never been, our minds draw an inaccurate picture based on travel brochures and television. The further the location is from your own home and culture, the harder it is to come up with an image that is even close because you don't have anything to work with.

We have no sense that allows us to accurately imagine what we have never experienced. Perhaps this is one reason that heaven is so hard for us to grasp. Some arrange elements of earth — harps, clouds, and choirs — into a cartoonish picture of eternity. Some visualize their favorite things in this life enjoyed without restraint. Others are overwhelmed by the idea of a future with no end, a concept hard to envision beyond the endless reflection in a three-way mirror. If your idea of heaven seems a little shabby even to you, it is because you don't know what you are talking about! Heaven is like nothing we have experienced with our senses on this earth: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Words fail us when we try to describe sight to a person who has never seen, or sound to a person who has never heard. Those who can't smell or taste have only a vague idea of what they are missing. Sensations are not communicable in words unless the person to whom you are speaking has or has had the use of that sense. This is not because our senses are unreal but because they are so profoundly real. The new heaven and the new earth are likewise profoundly real, too real to be conjectured in our limited imaginations.

Until the day when eternity becomes the present, we must continue to approximate it with the best that our five senses have known. But one day we will have the senses to experience the fullness of God's holiness, and it will be unlike anything we have ever tasted, felt, heard, or conceived.

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Three Sides of the Story

John 6:35

The most often visited Internet site of the summer of 2001 was reported to be that offering an interview with God. Written by an American Sunday school teacher, the website offered an imaginary question-and-answer session with God. One question was, “What surprises you most about humankind?” The answer was, “That they get bored with childhood. They rush to grow up and then long to be children again. That they lose their health to make money and then lose their money to restore their health.” An online measuring agency counted an amazing 2.4 million visitors in June alone. The site claimed that six million people around the world had logged on since the end of May 2001, and all this without advertising!

It seems we are still longing for a divine conversation to answer our cry. We are still looking for answers to the basic questions about life and human nature. We are still seeking the other side of the story. We are not merely biochemical machines composed of billions of atoms. There is more to us than the sum of our parts, and we are not just advanced mammals that happen to walk on two legs.

We are aware of three sides to our conscious nature. We are obviously physical beings, with appetites that are met by the physical world, and those appetites demand satisfaction from this source only. We are intelligent beings, capable of knowledge, have a strong desire to know things, and an aptitude for inquiry and long to know “why.” We are also spiritual and moral beings. This last quality is the one I'd like to focus on today.

No matter how hard we try to escape this reality, human beings have an irresistible longing that is correlated to God. This is expressed not only in an innate desire to worship, but in the need to understand what life is about — how we are to live and what we are to live for. In short, what the meaning and purpose of life is and how we can be happy. We therefore raise questions about right and wrong. We find ourselves troubled and uneasy inside because of our behavior and that of others. Sometimes a strange guilt oppresses us, but we cannot easily identify the cause. We have a sense of ultimate accountability for our actions, even when we consider ourselves answerable to no one. These feelings can be summed up in the word conscience, a self-knowledge about good and bad, right and wrong, an internal policeman whom we either ignore or heed. The Bible teaches that God has put this “law” in the heart and that only through obedience to the voice of conscience can we begin to address the spiritual longings of the moral side of our nature.

Keeping these things we know about ourselves in mind, I would argue that we no more need proof of God than a baby needs proof that food is available or that a child needs proof of things to be known. The existence of God, a recognition of accountability, and a sense of moral duty are all assumed as readily as the other categories of appetite. We may seek to escape this or reason it away (and some people resent the implications), but it lingers still.

The truth is, if we trace the problems of our own existence, at every turn our Creator confronts us. The teaching of Jesus in the Bible tackles our struggle head-on. As surely as the stomach rumbles for food and the mind questions after truth, so the soul longs for God and for virtue. Our yearnings are our appetite for God. If we fail to recognize this, unhappiness and a sense of something missing will give way to overwhelming guilt, fear, despair, and moral confusion. These feelings either grow in intensity or disappear altogether, leaving us feeling empty, without any desire for God or moral truth, like a starving stomach unable to hold down food.

The Bible presents a feast for the soul for those who will partake of it. Jesus Christ is the only remedy for our condition. But how fitting and far-reaching is his response, “I am the bread of life. No one who comes to me will ever be hungry again. Those who believe in me will never thirst” (John 6:35, NLT).

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Windows of Something Other

Ecclesiastes 2:22

There is a single plastic lawn chair that sits small and out of place in the jungle of massive concrete pillars Atlantans know as “Spaghetti Junction.” A tangled intersection of two major interstates and its deluge of exits, onramps, over- and underpasses, Spaghetti Junction is a picture of ordered chaos, the arteries and veins of a busy city. To say the least, the small chair positioned to sit and watch from the side of the road is unbefitting of the environment. Spaghetti Junction is far from relaxing; people who sit still on Atlanta highways sit with enormous risk.

As I drove, I was immediately struck by the ridiculousness of the chair from the perspective of a driver. Who would sit in the middle of a knotted mess of highways? But as I sat in my car, barely inching forward, with a scowl on my face as I watched the car in front of me trying to cut off the merging motorist in front of him, it occurred to me how ridiculous I must have looked from the perspective of the chair. Taking in the soaring overpasses and congested ramps of an anxious world always on the move is perhaps to see some of the absurdity in our distracted lives.

King Solomon spoke as a man sitting in a chair under Spaghetti Junction: “What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun? All his days his work is pain and grief; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 2:22-23). It was from such a perspective that Solomon concluded wisely, “I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:10-11).

Every so often in our busy lives there is a moment of heightened perspective. Life is grasped in a way that is usually unnoticed. What is unseen becomes jarringly visible. Such moments are cherished when they come, and yet we often seem to position our lives so that they will not come. I had never looked at Spaghetti Junction through the eyes of a still and silent observer. But I have seen it habitually as an impatient motorist. Along the daily roadways of life and toil, so the workings of a sovereign God are easy to overlook. It is with good reason that Karl Barth refers to God as “wholly other.” And it is no wonder that we have been given the command to be still and know Him. How else would we learn to see God?

Other times, we are more like bystanders in his decision to appear. When Jacob fell asleep at Bethel, he had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. Above the ladder stood the LORD, and he said: “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac... I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go” (Genesis 28:13,15). Waking from his sleep, Jacob exclaimed, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it. How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven” (28:16-17).

Each time I imagine this story, I am struck by the image of a world where there are windows and gates to heaven. There are places where heaven and earth meet at great crossroads, moments when we are given opportunities to see things beyond us, to see things as they really are: The intersection between heaven and earth is a busy place. Like Spaghetti Junction, it is full of activity I must stop and strain to see or I will speed past unknowingly. Sometimes, like Jacob stirred to reality, we discover that God was there all along, though we were not of aware of it. Other reminders of the wholly other come less boldly and with greater responsibility: a conviction in the heart, an answer to prayer, a vision of Christ gleaned in the midst of pain. In any case, the LORD is in this place. This very moment is none other than the house of God. This day is filled with the windows of heaven.

________

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I Will Follow

Luke 9:57

Fifty years ago she was asked with 3 others to relinquish her seat on a crowded bus for a white man who had just boarded. Though they were already seated in the section reserved for blacks, they were ordered by the bus driver to stand in the aisle. Three complied. Rosa Parks remained seated. Recalling the incident for a television series in 1987, Parks said quietly: “When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up and I said, 'No, I'm not.’ And he said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.’ I said, 'You may do that.'“ She was immediately arrested and ordered to pay a fine of fourteen dollars.

Mrs. Parks died this week at the age of 92, a woman history will remember for her courage and conviction. As she hurriedly left the department store where she worked as a seamstress on Dec. 1, 1955, the last thing she was thinking about was becoming a symbol of the Civil Rights movement. She had errands to run and preparations to make for a workshop that she was organizing for teenagers that weekend. “So it was not a time for me to be planning to get arrested,” she said in an interview.

There are moments in life that call us out of our daily lives and into something beyond it. Almost always these moments come with a certain degree of inconvenience. The soft spoken Montgomery seamstress who refused to give up her seat could have given heed to injustice with the rationale of not wanting to get involved or the daunting thought of all the things she had to get done that day. Instead, she brought about the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and ignited the Civil Rights movement.

As Jesus and his disciples walked throughout the cities of Palestine, they often encountered would-be disciples. “I will follow you wherever you go,” called out one man. “I will follow,” said another. Jesus' responses are surprising, perhaps especially to those of us who long for others to see the appeal of Christianity. We would rejoice in such an eager declaration to follow Christ. But Jesus spoke more candidly about the inconveniences of discipleship, the cost of standing with God, than he did the allure of it.

The gospel of Luke recounts one follower replying to the call of Christ, “Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.” Jesus answered him, “Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God.” Another man said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first permit me to say good-bye to those at home.” But Jesus said to him, “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:57-62).

I used to feel as though his responses were somewhat severe, if not insensitive — one man was grieving the death of his father; another only wanted to say goodbye to his family. But then I was hurt by the apathy of a friend; I wounded someone with my silence; I persecuted a neighbor by passivity. And I realized that there is always going to be one more excuse. There is always going to be something that needs to be done first, a reason to wait silently or follow later or protest injustice at a better time. There is always going to be an inconvenience to setting down my life for the sake of another. The call to follow Christ is not theoretical; he makes it clear from the start that the only way to follow is by leaving all and going completely with the incarnate son of God.

There are moments in life that call us out of our daily lives and into something beyond it. What if it is God who is calling?

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A Christian Vision of Beauty, Part One

Mark 14:16

I have been asked tonight to talk about a Christian vision of beauty, and I am first struck by the fact that this conversation would be so rare. There are altogether too few opportunities for Christians to ponder some of the biggest questions of life. We tend to focus on the questions of urgency and the questions of immediate interest. That is not to say that such questions are improper, but it is to say that Christian thought can sometimes fall out of balance. One of the realities we face is that in a conversation like this, we are not exactly sure where to begin. Where should we begin talking about beauty?

Allow me to make a couple of preliminary observations, the first of which is this: There is something intrinsic to humanity that is drawn to beauty. There is something of an aesthetic desire in us -- an aesthetic appetite. Even infants are attracted to certain objects and even faces because of complexity and color and light, those elements which aesthetic theorists have considered the very substance of beauty, form, and attractiveness. Moreover, this desire for and recognition of beauty is something unique to human beings. Dogs do not contemplate a sunset. Animals do not ponder the beauty of the landscape. It is true the heavens are declaring the glory of God, but most of the creatures on the planet are oblivious to this fact. They neither make nor observe nor appreciate art. They stage no dramas, write no music, and paint no portraits. The desire for art is something unique and nearly universal among human beings.

At the same time, we must understand that beauty is in crisis; it is a contested category. Let me suggest two reasons why this is so. First, beauty is a category in crisis because it has been so devalued in the reigning confusion of popular culture. The fact is that we have come to use the word “beautiful” in an altogether awkward and inappropriate context. We speak of BEAUTY, when what we really mean is PRETTINESS, or attractiveness, or even likeability. None of these things, however, is actually equal to beauty. Yet the popular culture increasingly confuses the artificial for the real, the pretty for the beautiful, and the untrue for the true -- all of which are essentially one root confusion, as we shall see.

Second, beauty is a category in crisis also at the level of elite culture and academia, where philosophers who give attention to aesthetic theory are increasingly convinced that beauty is a shopworn category. It is either political, or entirely subjective, or delusional. Many of the major writers in philosophy suggest that beauty is a category we ought to discard altogether. The idea of beauty, they say, is too expensive, too contested, and too misleading.

In the history of Western thought, beauty has often been a difficult category. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, for example, was convinced that in the end aesthetics was a divergence from ethics, so that to be concerned with the beautiful was to be inadequately concerned for the good. Friedrich Nietzche, the very prophet of nihilism himself, believed that the category of beauty was a symptom of the decadence and the weakness of modern humanity. Only the decadent would consider beauty important, he argued, because all that finally matters is power. Perhaps in reality, Nietzche saw only power as beautiful.

But if beauty is in crisis in terms of the culture, both at the popular level and among the elites, it is also in trouble in the church, where the influence of popular culture has led to confusion about what beauty actually is and why we as Christians should seek it.

A Christian understanding of beauty runs directly into the wisdom of the age by suggesting that the beautiful is simultaneously the good and the true and the real. This goes all the way back to the conversation of the ancients -- especially to Plato, who understood the good, the beautiful, the true, and the real as being essentially reducible to the same thing. If there is one good, then that good must also be the true, which must also be the real, which must also be the beautiful. So the good, the beautiful, the true, and the real -- the four great historical transcendentals -- are unified in the One. For Plato, however, the One had no name.

Augustine, the great theologian of the patristic era, identified the One as the one true and living God. Taking Plato's metaphysical speculations into the very heart of the Gospel, Augustine suggested that Christians uniquely understand that the good, the beautiful, the true, and the real, are indeed one, because they are established in the reality of the self-revealing God -- the triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He alone is beautiful, He alone is good, He alone is true, and He alone is real. That is not to suggest that nothing else reflects beauty or truth or goodness. It is simply to say that He alone, by virtue of the fact that He is infinite in all His perfections, is the source and the judge and the end of all that is good, beautiful, true, and real. For as Paul said, from Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever, Amen.

Now this Christian conversation about the transcendentals opens an entirely new awareness for us. We now begin to understand that there is a moral context, a truth context, to every question about beauty. We can no longer talk about beauty as a mere matter of taste. Instantly, by affirming the unity of the transcendentals, we are required to see beauty fundamentally as a matter of truth to which taste is accountable, rather than a matter of taste to which truth is accountable.

Thus, it violates Scripture and indeed the character of God to call something “beautiful” which is not good, or “true” which is not beautiful, or “real” which is not true. Yet if we are honest, we admit to ourselves that in our common cultural conversation, we routinely sever the good from the true, the true from the beautiful, the beautiful from the real, and the real from the good. As Christians, we alone really understand why this is so, and why it so important.

Augustine understood that beauty was a key Christian category. Indeed, Christians cannot properly think as Christians without understanding the power of beauty. In his CONFESSIONS he said this: “I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new! I have learnt to love you late! You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself. I searched for you outside myself and, disfigured as I was, I fell upon the lovely things of your creation. The beautiful things of this world kept me from you and yet, if they had not been in you, they would have had no being at all.” In that confessional statement, Augustine is saying that it was beauty that was calling him. It was his Creator that was calling him, and yet he was distracted by the things of APPARENT beauty in the world. And yet he does not despise those things; he remembers that their beauty is merely a reflected beauty, derived from the fact that God is their Creator.

Augustine continues: “It was you then, O Lord, who made them. You who are beautiful, for they too are beautiful. You who are good, for they too are good. You who are, for they too are. But they are not beautiful and good as you are beautiful and good. Nor do they have their being as you the Creator have your being. In comparison with you, they have neither beauty nor goodness nor being at all.” Augustine realizes that in order to see true beauty, he has to go to his Creator, and then, knowing the Creator, he may observe the creation and see that it does indeed bear the mark of its Maker. There is undeniable beauty in creation, but in comparison with the infinite beauty of the Creator, such finite beauty no longer has the seductive allure it once had. All earthly beauty is simultaneously validated and relativized by the contemplation of the beauty of God.

The same theme was picked up by Jonathan Edwards, who said this: “True holiness must mainly consist in love to God, for holiness consists in loving what is most excellent and beautiful. Because God is infinitely the most beautiful and excellent being, He must necessarily be loved supremely by those who are truly holy. It follows from this that God's own holiness must consist primarily in love to Himself. Being most holy, He most loves what is good and beautiful, that is Himself. To love completely what is most completely good is to be most completely perfect. From this, it follows that a truly holy mind, above all other things, seeks the glory of God and makes the glory of God His supreme governing and ultimate end.”

In that brief statement, Edwards does something very helpful and very consistent with the Christian tradition. As a matter of fact, it is a necessary insight once we go to the Scriptures. If you search through the Old Testament, you will notice that the word “beauty” is really not there. Instead, it is the word “glory.” Throughout the Bible, the beauty of God is most commonly described as His GLORY. Once we understand the biblical category of glory -- that is, the reality of God in terms of His inner reality and the external manifestation of Himself -- we realize that God's glory encompasses all the transcendentals. To gaze upon God is not first of all to see His beauty, but rather His GLORY.

Edwards defined beauty as consisting mostly in “sweet mutual consents.” By this, Edwards meant that things are rightly set: The thing is what God declared that it must be. In other words, beauty is achieved when the thing created most closely and most perfectly glorifies its Creator. Thus a “sweet mutual consent,” or absolute harmony, exists between the created thing and the Creator.

When we look at the unity of the transcendentals, and compare Edwards' and Augustine's vision of view to our contemporary poverty concerning things beautiful, we are quickly and painfully aware that something has gone horribly wrong. Why would human beings seek to sunder the unity between the good and the beautiful, between the true and the real, between the beautiful and the true? Why would we want to call something that is ugly true? Why would we want to call something that is unreal beautiful? That is a symptom of a human sickness, and that sickness is sin.

Our understanding of beauty as a category in crisis begins not with contemporary confusion, but in the Garden of Eden, where our first parents were attracted to the forbidden fruit at least in part because it was attractive to the eyes. A false understanding of beauty -- the false allure of the evil rather than the good -- is a part of the story of the Fall. Thus the confusion over beauty is not merely an item of cultural consternation, nor is it merely a matter of theological debate. It is a matter of redemption. The only way out of our confusion over beauty is to know the Creator, to know Him not merely conceptually but personally, and to have our relationship with Him once again set right, something which only He can do. Then Edwards' vision of the “sweet mutual consents” might be realized -- a redeemed people once again entering into the mutual consent of the good, the beautiful, the true, and the real.

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This is an edited transcript of an address Dr. Mohler gave on November 14, 2005, at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C.

Lost Chords

There are a few great lines I know by memory simply because my boss is fond of repeating them. Ravi Zacharias often quotes a song titled THE LOST CHORD, which was penned by Adelaide Proctor and set to music by Arthur Sullivan. It is a hymn that describes a moment of transcendence, a hint of wonder that appeared momentarily and left the narrator yearning for more. The song tells his story:

Seated one day at the organ

I was weary and ill at ease,

and my fingers wandered idly

over the noisy keys.

I know not what I was playing

or what I was dreaming then,

but I struck one chord of music

like the sound of a great “Amen.”

It flooded the crimson twilight

like the close of an angel’s psalm,

and it lay on my fevered spirit

like the touch of infinite calm.

It quieted pain and sorrow

like love overcoming strife;

it seemed the harmonious echo

of our discordant life.

It linked all perplexed meanings

into one perfect peace,

and it trembled away into silence

as if it were loathe to cease.

I have sought but I seek it vainly —

that one lost chord divine —

that came from the soul of the organ

and entered into mine.

It may be that death’s bright angel

will speak in that chord again;

it may be that only in heaven

I shall hear that grand “Amen.”

The wonder of this world is amplified by the fact that it ends, that it “trembles away into silence.” But what are these fleeting moments, which touch us with an infinite calm, and link perplexed meanings with peace? In our lost chords, something comes and vanishes. But it creates a hunger for more, a longing for something that, though we seek, cannot be fully reached in this life, a thirst that points us to what we were ultimately made to know. If God has set eternity in our hearts as Solomon observed, then perhaps in moments such as these, we are longing for home.

Significantly, Arthur Sullivan tried to set Proctor’s words to music for several years, but he was unsuccessful until he faced the death of his brother. Painfully aware of the fragility of life, grieving the untimely death of one he dearly treasured, Sullivan was able to pen the magnificent music to words that were undoubtedly of great comfort. Through tears he looked toward home, and it “quieted pain and sorrow like love overcoming strife.”

This is what the certain revelation of God does for our lives. Christ comes and presents the hopeful vision of one who overcame death. But he also comes into our lives and touches us with strength for today and peace for what is to come.

The psalmist says in 16:11, “You have made known to me the path of life; you fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.” There are few analogies in this present world that lend a hand in our comprehending of eternal pleasure and ultimate joy. But I believe there are hints all around us, and one day we will hear again these grand “Amens.”

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Bidden Or Not

Mark 1:15

Carved in Latin over the office door (and tomb) of psychoanalyst Carl Jung were the words, "Bidden or not bidden, God is present."

Jung found it in the writings of the Renaissance scholar Erasmus, who said it was an ancient Spartan proverb.

I Was There

Psalms 90:2

How do you know that God exists? How do you know that God loves you? These questions, upon the hearts of so many, have answers as real as the formative moments in your life.

As I have aged I seem to grow more and more prone to nostalgia. Many of us do this instinctively, clinging to memories past, perhaps looking backwards with the hope of seeing a purpose for our lives. When I travel to India, I make it a point to revisit time and again those significant marking points of my own life. As I recall these moments past but not forgotten, I hear the gentle voice of the God very much in the present. And He says, “I was there.” “When on you were on your bike contemplating suicide, I was there. When you were but 9 years old and your grandmother died, I arranged for her gravestone to hold in time the very verse that would lead you to conversion. I was there.”

It is in these harrowing moments -- your parents divorce, your child’s birth, the death of a loved one -- where God leaves a defining mark. There is reason you remember such moments so vividly. We have a choice to hear or to ignore, but regardless his voice cries out in our memories, “I was there.” He has been in our past. He is here today. He will be there in our future.

God exists, as Lewis worded it well, in the “eternal now.” And the psalmist, always writing with feet firmly planted in time, but arms ever reaching for the eternal, beautifully explains, “Thou art God from age to age the same.” (Psalm 90:2) We need not be intimidated by the peril of the moment. As we look back on these markers in time, there is a sense of the transcendent, a glimpse of a reality greater than this, and beaming from this reality is the eternal love of God. He was with you then. He is there with you now. And He loves you.

William Shakespeare once reasoned, “Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.” How do you know that God loves you? While you and I were yet sinners, still lost in realms of selfish time, Christ gave his life for us. And that sacrifice stands as the greatest marker in time. It is the point at which eternity itself entered into the fullness of time to reach you and me, right now, and forever. He is there with you now.

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Painting and Counting Stars: The Saving Power of Beauty

Job 9:9

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky said that “Beauty will save the world.” Reflecting on those words in his 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn asked, “What sort of a statement is that? ... How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything?”

This is a legitimate question in a sin-cursed world wracked with natural disasters, human violence and deceit, disease, war, famine, cancer, and mental illness. In the face of such evil and suffering, beauty can seem quaint and powerless, at best a distraction and certainly not a solution. And yet, beauty is particularly effective in bringing joy and appreciation to the forefront of our lives, introducing us to names from the past we might otherwise not know, and placing the image of God in men and women on full display.

Take Vincent Van Gogh, the 19th-century Dutch painter of glowing flowers and heavenly lights whose art so starkly contrasted with his troubled life. Writing in The Wall Street Journal recently, John Miller argued that Van Gogh’s art testifies to a stubborn faith, even during his darkest moments. Not only is that faith evident in the Dutch master’s work, it is evident in his words.

In a letter to his brother two years before his death, Van Gogh wrote that he still had a tremendous need for religion, “so I go outside at night to paint the stars.” The result of this routine was a painting recognized as a masterpiece. The Starry Night, which currently hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, exhibits the ethereal light, the “bold color and coarse brushwork,” that would immortalize the name of Van Gogh after his untimely death. It is also what Os Guinness, when quoting sociologist Peter Berger, calls a “signal of transcendence.” In other words, stars mean something.

Miller points out that Van Gogh’s several starry-themed paintings include Christian imagery that is easy to miss: churches and convents, crosses, and perhaps even a reference to the twelve disciples.

Though Van Gogh wasn’t a religious painter in a strict sense, his faith, Miller argues, “flows as a powerful undercurrent” in all his art. It also shaped his life. At one point, Van Gogh even aimed to be ordained as a minister, but his quirks sabotaged his theological education and many of his relationships, so he decided to become a self-taught painter instead.

The young artist produced 900 paintings, only one of which actually sold during his lifetime. His mental health continued to decline, eventually devolving into the well-known incident where he cut off his own ear, before he finally committed suicide.

Today, historians and psychologists speculate that Vincent Van Gogh suffered from manic depression or bipolar disorder. His life is a sad mixture of beauty and psychosis over which someone might scribble, as his fellow painter Edvard Munch did over his own iconic work, The Scream, “[this] can only have been painted by a madman.” The reason we know Van Gogh’s name, however, is not his madness but his eye for beauty and the ability to express it on canvas. As one documentary put it, Vincent was at his sanest when he was painting.

In his Nobel Prize speech, Solzhenitsyn said that “a work of art bears within itself its own verification.”

... those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force — they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

For millennia, Christians have celebrated truth, goodness, and beauty as transcendent testimonies to God’s existence and character. While it is possible to deny truth and goodness, Solzhenitsyn thought beauty had an “irrefutable” quality that “forces even an opposing heart to surrender.” Beauty arrests us, cuts through our objections as the light of the stars cut through Van Gogh’s troubled mind, and leaves us blessedly vulnerable to God’s grace, even in this dark and fallen world.

In his song, “Count the Stars,” my friend Josh Bales writes, “On my darkest night a million beams of light ask me to believe that your promise is like a starlit sky/ bigger than my dreams/ So in my doubting dark I count the stars.”

Truth, wrote the Apostle John, is a person who has Himself faced suffering and will, in the end, answer all questions and make all things new. If the vision that finally captivated a broken Dutch painter is that same Person, then Dostoevsky was right. Beauty will save the world. In fact, He has.

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The Searchers: Restless Until…

Luke 24:13

On August 24, 1926, more than 100,000 people lined up in my neighborhood right outside of the Frank Campbell funeral home here in Manhattan. Actually, “lined up” is too formal and orderly a word to describe what was happening: Windows were smashed, and some of the “mourners” reportedly committed suicide. “Never before,” in the words of the funeral director, “have so many people tried to see a body.”

It wasn’t just any old body: It was the remains of silent film star Rudolph Valentino. A silent legend in life, he became a kind of silent god in death.

My friend Joe Loconte cites this by way of illustrating the fact that every society contains people who long to be in touch with the divine and transcendent. Loconte calls these people the “God Seekers.” And while they don’t always look in the right places, there’s no doubt that they are seeking.

We’ve all heard countless times that we’re living in a “secular age.” We’ve seen the statistics saying that the number of people who don’t identify with any religion is growing rapidly.

While the statistics are true up to a point, we need to put them in context. What makes our age “secular,” according to philosopher Charles Taylor, is that people today treat belief in God as optional in ways that were literally unimaginable to people 500 or even 200 years ago. Ideas and cultural changes made this optional belief possible and, in turn, relegated religion to the private sphere.

But none of this changes the fact that, as St. Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Our age may tell us that belief is optional, (especially belief in God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ), but that does nothing for our restlessness.

Joe Loconte’s fabulous new book, “The Searchers,” is a kind of field guide to that restlessness. In Loconte’s telling, many of us are in a situation similar to the travelers on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. Our expectations have been, as the cliché goes, overtaken by events. The story we have invested in isn’t likely to turn out the way we hoped that it would.

For the disciples on the road to Emmaus, disillusionment came from a failure to understand how God intended to redeem Israel. They literally could not see the risen Christ until Jesus had “explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” and broke bread with them.

For our contemporaries, making faith in God optional made faith in a series of illusions possible. Loconte ticks them off one-by-one in a chapter entitled, aptly enough, “The End of Illusions.”

Politics, ideology, our careers and kids, and even romantic love — all of these have failed to quell our restlessness. But, like the Emmaus-bound travelers, something we’ve been told gives us a basis for hope, a reason to keep seeking! The question is: Do we dare believe again?

Loconte’s answer is, of course, a resounding “yes.” Belief may have become optional nowadays, but reasons for that belief are as valid today as they were on the road to Emmaus nearly two thousand years ago. Those reasons are the subject of tomorrow’s broadcast.

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Being Part of Something Bigger

Mark 3:24

James Mattis, a former Marine general who had been recently appointed Secretary of Defense, was being interviewed by reporter Dexter Filkins. The reporter asked Mattis what worried him most in his new position. Filkins expected him to say ISIS or Russia or the defense budget. Instead, Mattis said, “The lack of political unity in America. The lack of a fundamental friendliness. It seems like an awful lot of people in America and around the world feel spiritually and personally alienated, whether it be from organized religion or from local community school districts or from their governments. ... If you lose any sense of being part of something bigger, then why should you care about your fellow-man?”

Extraterrestrials and Our Search For God

Recent news about the United States’ Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP) -- aimed at investigating “unexplainable” incidents in the skies -- causes many people to wonder whether intelligent beings exist outside of Earth.

While many of us roll our eyes at the suggestion of little green men flying around outside our solar system, it is not a universal skepticism. For some people the hope is that we are not alone and that if we look hard enough we can find a way to communicate with our non-human neighbors.

The government’s AATIP program has been funded for years without widespread public knowledge, according to reports by major media outlets such as The New York Times. While there’s a bit of a stigma in America associated with searching for extraterrestrials, interestingly it is not prevalent in other countries. The Chinese government has publicly invested $185 million to build the largest satellite dish in the world, 400 meters wider than its American counterpart. Located in the mountains of China, the satellite is not devoted to national security or better cellular signals. Its purpose is to attempt first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.

China’s leaders may have political and economic reasons to search for life in space, but for many people the belief in and search for intelligence beyond Earth is akin to religion.

Commenting on the Chinese satellite dish, author Ross Anderson noted in The Atlantic that the scientific community’s search for extraterrestrials “is motivated by deep human desires for connection and transcendence. It concerns itself with questions about human origins ... about our future in this universe.”

People have had the same desire for centuries. Our ancestors built temples, made sacrifices and devoted their lives to the deity or movement they believed would satisfy their hunger for spiritual experiences. Today, we buy bigger houses, invest more in ourselves and skip from one philosophy to the next, all to no avail.

Ed Ames captures the plight of humanity’s search in his song, “Who will Answer?” when he asks, “Is our hope in walnut shells worn ‘round the neck with temple bells, or deep within some cloistered walls where hooded figures pray in halls? Or crumbled books on dusty shelves, or in our stars, or in ourselves? Who will answer?”

We have the answer. In fact the answer is found on many a dusty bookshelf. Sadly, while people are willing to spend millions of dollars and search endlessly both on Earth and among the stars for a spiritual connection, the answer sits nestled on countless bookstore shelves, collecting dust between the Koran and books about the latest religious fad.

Ironically, as the Bible rests between books about reaching out to God, it waits to proclaim to its reader the freedom we can receive from the one true God who came down to us. While we have used our human resources to invent every imaginable explanation for our existence and how to make it meaningful, God’s Word tells us that the spiritual connection we desire is waiting for us if we will only have a relationship with Him.

He didn’t create us and then leave us to search endlessly for Him. He came down to us, lived among us and sacrificed Himself in order to pave the way for an eternal relationship. As Christians, we have the message of life not only on our shelves but also in our hearts, and we are God’s plan to spread that message to the people who do not yet know Him. Let us renew our commitment to sharing the Gospel this year so that our neighbors can stop looking to the stars for answers, and start looking to the God who created them.

The God Who Hears Our Laments

John 11:35

Pastoral theology is tested in a time of crisis. War, famine, natural disasters, and plagues are winds that sift chaff from wheat, or purifying fires revealing so much dross mixed with the precious gold of the gospel.

What do you do when you can’t meet? When you can’t take the Lord’s Supper together as a body? When you want to counsel the sick and the needy, but you’re unable to reach them? How should Christians respond? With repentance, fasting, and prayer? Jeremiads of judgment? Long-winded theodicies?

N.T. Wright has weighed in with a widely-shared bit of pastoral counsel over at TIME. Against rationalists who want either easy explanation for everything (it’s God’s judgment, it’s a trial, it’s for the greater good), and Romanticists looking for a “sigh of relief”, he wisely reminds us that the Christian Scriptures offer the tradition of lament. In lament, Christians follow the Psalmist in crying out to God, giving full vent to our frustration, horror, and pain. We bring before him our confusion, our loneliness, our misery, our sins and our accusations We grieve before God’s face.

Of course, that raises the ultimate question: who is God in the middle of all this? What kind of God are we lamenting to?

According to Wright, the mystery of the Biblical story is that he is one who, “also laments.”

God was grieved to his heart, Genesis declares, over the violent wickedness of his human creatures. He was devastated when his own bride, the people of Israel, turned away from him. And when God came back to his people in person — the story of Jesus is meaningless unless that’s what it’s about — he wept at the tomb of his friend. St. Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit “groaning” within us, as we ourselves groan within the pain of the whole creation. The ancient doctrine of the Trinity teaches us to recognize the One God in the tears of Jesus and the anguish of the Spirit.

And so, because God is a God who laments with us, we are invited to put down our easy explanations, lament, and embody the love of God.

Now, as with most of what Wright says, the issue comes not so much when we look at what he affirms, but what he seems to deny. Against the God who laments and cares, he poses the God of, “Some Christians” who “like to think of God as above all that, knowing everything, in charge of everything, calm and unaffected by the troubles in his world.”

Two problems emerge.

First, and largest, is that this seems to be a description of the Biblical God. According to the Psalmist, God is above all that — unlike fickle, finite, pagan gods who are just like us, he sits enthroned in the heavens and does what he wants (Ps. 22:3; 115:3). God sees all and knows all — even the mischief of evildoers (Ps. 10:13-14). God is immovable, a Rock, a fortress, a deliverer and high tower (Ps. 18:2). It is to God the Rock that David calls out in distress and commits his spirit into his hands (Ps. 31:2-5, 15). It is to God the Rock is the one to whom David cries “why have you forgotten me?” (Ps. 42:9). God the almighty, who rules the raging seas, calming them with a word (Ps. 89:8-9). God the everlasting, God the one who brings our days to an end by his anger (Ps. 90:7-8), is the one who can “satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love” (90:14). That is the God before whom Psalmists lament.

Second, that description fits the view of most Christians throughout church history. Reading those verses, they’ve affirmed God’s transcendence, his omniscience, his immutable sovereignty, and his impassibility. As the 39 Articles have it, he is “without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness,” since as “the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible” he is incapable of being overwhelmed or changed by them.

Furthermore, they affirmed all these things even while reading Biblical language about God repenting and lamenting. Knowing that immutability didn’t mean immobility and that a lack of passions did not mean a lack of concern, they saw these as expressions of God’s grace. As a humble and kind Lord, in order to convey his divine care, he takes up human language and conceptualities and accommodates himself to our capacity to understand even if they did not apply to him as proper expressions of his divine being.

Now, in the 20th Century it’s been common trade in something like this “classical” package for a more relational God, a fellow-sufferer who feels our pains by scrapping immutability, impassibility, and modifying our understanding of his sovereignty and wisdom. This is a special temptation for scholars with a bad case of biblical studies prejudice. This is bad, for many reasons.

Perhaps Wright isn’t trying to do something that drastic in a brief, TIME article even if it reads that way on the surface. Folks do get touchy with Wright, over-reacting and over-interpreting. What’s more, this could be an instance of his trademark “let me inadvertently caricature others while critiquing a caricature“ move.

All the same, in reviewing the Biblical material, we see the problem with Wright’s intended corrective is that he ends up neglecting to set all the language of God’s passion in their broader theological and Biblical context. And for that reason, we lack the proper context for lament.

In the Psalms, we can bring our laments before the Lord precisely because he is “above all that.” When a child runs hurting to Dad, yes, there is something comforting about sympathy, about Dad saying, “Yes, there, there, I know it hurts. I understand.” But ultimately, you run to Dad because he is not overwhelmed just like you. Because he is a shelter. Because he can hold you when you cry. Because he’s strong enough to absorb the shaking and trembling without trembling himself. Because he can do something about it. And if he doesn’t yet, he’s big enough that you can trust him because he’s wiser than you.

In other words, yes, God grieves human sin and then he sends a flood and a man with boat. God is dismayed at Israel’s infidelity and so he exiles them and brings them home. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus and then he told him to get back up.

Indeed, that is the heart of the gospel — the God who cannot suffer and die in himself, the one who is high and exalted, humbles himself, becomes lowly, taking on human flesh so that he can suffer, die, and be raised again for our salvation. It is precisely because God is “above all that” in himself that he can enter in to do something about all that. It is only because God is blessed in himself — the sovereign fullness of life, peace, and joy — regardless of all the vicissitudes and pains of history, that he can communicate a blessedness that overcomes and restores that history.

It is not, then, God the grand co-commiserator who gives us the freedom to cry out, but God the Rock. This is the God we can trust with our pain, our confusion, and grief even when he gives no answers, precisely because he is big enough to be the only answer we need.

Stay Alive All Your Life

Mark 16:9

These manifestations of disappearing and reappearing [the appearances by Jesus after Easter] were designed to emphasize that, while He seemed to be gone, He was not, but is ever near to us. Then comes the astonishing statement that we shall know the same aliveness after the experience called death. “Because I live, ye shall live also” (John 14:19). The mere fact that we can no longer see our loved ones in the flesh does not at all mean that they are not alive. They still live in this dynamic, mysterious universe, even as we, too, shall live forever.

The day I received the news that my mother had died, I went to Marble Collegiate Church and sat in the pulpit. I did that because she had always told me, “Whenever you are in that pulpit I will be with you.” I wanted to feel her presence.

Then, I went into my study. On the table lies a Bible. It lay there that morning, and it has been there ever since. It is old and tattered now, but that Bible will remain there as long as I am connected with the church, and then I will take it with me wherever I may go. I never give a sermon that I do not, first, put my hand on that Bible.

On that morning of her physical death, I placed my hand on the Bible, in an instinctive desire for comfort, and stood looking out toward Fifth Avenue, when all of a sudden, I distinctly felt two cupped hands, soft as eiderdown, resting gently on my head. And I had a feeling of inexpressible joy.

I have always had a questioning mind and, even then, I began to deal factually with this experience, reasoning that it was hallucination due to grief. But I did not believe my own attempt to reason it away. Then the idea dawned that I should lift my thinking to the spiritual level and realize that in this dynamic universe, what we call death is but the change in form of deathless spirit. From that moment, I never doubted my mother’s spiritual aliveness.

I once wrote of this incident in a magazine article, and received scores of letters from people who told of a like experience. One physician wrote: “I was attending a man in his last illness. Suddenly, a look came over his face that can only be described as out of this world in its beauty. He began to call by name his mother, father, brother, sister. Then he said, ‘Why, Frank, I didn’t know you were there.’ And, closing his eyes, his spirit took flight. “The daughter of the man,” the doctor continued, “told me that mother and father, brother and sister, had been dead for years. But about his mentioning Frank, she could not understand. Frank was not dead.

“An hour later came the message that Frank, a cousin, had been killed in an accident some hours before.”

They live and they will live forever as you will, also, in this dynamic universe. The conviction that this is true first gripped me years ago, in a little country cemetery in Ohio. I was standing by my father’s side as the body of my beloved grandmother was lowered into the grave. I felt sorry for him that day, for he was sad and so was I. I can see the preacher even yet, standing by the grave and, in memory, hear the strong, sure tone of his voice as he repeated those immortal words, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.

“And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (John 11:25-26). Suddenly, I had one of those flashing experiences of intuitive perception and instantly, deep in my heart, knew that immortality is a true belief.

A while ago, on a sun-kissed day, I came to the place where those words were first spoken. We rounded a turn in the road that winds up to Jerusalem, and there, on the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, was the village of Bethany, just as it appeared in every Biblical picture book. We came to the grave where once rested the body of Lazarus and descended to the spot from which he came forth. Later, emerging into the brilliant daylight, we stood by the open tomb and read aloud the great words. The place where we were standing must have been almost the exact spot where Jesus made that immortal statement to those grieving people.

You never know when a great experience is going to come. When least expected, an unforgettable moment flashes across your life with inexpressible meaning. It is difficult to recall, without deep emotion, the feeling of absolute certainty that burned into my mind that the words spoken there nearly twenty centuries ago are absolutely true. I turned to my wife and said, “Think of all the grieving millions of people down the centuries who have been comforted by the words that were spoken here.”

Religion

Luke 4:2

RELIGION

If 'religion' is understood ... as man's search for God on man's own terms, as

his effort to make some kind of adjustment to the 'ground of being' on a level

less radical than that of the self-forgetful commitment of faith, it clearly

can become faith's greatest enemy, the last bastion of human pride to hold out

against God. The experience of the Jews in relation to Jesus, and of the

churches throughout the ages, demonstrates that this is the most persistent

and far-reaching temptation which confronts men. To call attention to this is

always an urgently necessary part of the prophetic ministry within the Church.

... Daniel Jenkins, "Religion and Coming of Age"

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