Lose Graciously, Preach Patiently

[Updated 2Jul2015]
In the last two days, the Supreme Court of the United States has released two important decisions. The first came out yesterday and affirmed the structure, and therefore the practical existence, of the Affordable Healthcare Act (commonly known as, “Obamacare”). The second was this morning and decided that same-sex “marriage” must be allowed in all 50 states, and any same-sex “marriage” in one state must be recognized in all the others. I'm kind of looking forward to the next SCOTUS business day: something interesting will come!

            The same-sex “marriage” case, “Obergefell v. Hodges,” should not be a surprise to anyone. Public opinion on the issue has shifted swiftly and dramatically in the last half-decade, though the notions have been simmering for several decades. Essentially, when the first state legalized same-sex “marriage” (Massachusetts), then every state was challenged to recognize those “marriages” through the ‘Full Faith and Credit’ clause of the U.S. Constitution (U.S.Const. art. IV,  §1).

            As an attorney with a basic understanding of Federal-State relationships, as well as personal rights, it is tempting to launch into a legal analysis of the case. But the decision, and its dissents (here’s an initial survey: http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevinwax/2015/06/26/top-10-quotes-from-the-dissenting-justices-on-same-sex-marriage/), will stand on its own.

            I offer a few thoughts on the decision; shooting from the hip …

·      I was disappointed that the country has chosen to re-define marriage. There is no debate about what happened. When I hold up a red ball and ask you what color it is, you would be tempted to say, “red.” But now I, with the weapons of the government, say: “It is blue. Also red.” That is re-definition. The court today claims that re-definition of marriage has been a phenomena during all of the country’s history. For example, marriage was prohibited between members of different races. But it is one thing to prohibit marriage between members of a group and another to make gender into merely another group

·      While the concept of civil unions was promising for same-sex couples, ultimately structural discrimination still existed and same-sex couples found little pragmatic help in the Defense Of Marriage Act. It seems to me the failure of DOMA was that it still institutionalized significant discrimination

·      One statement by the court was that any union that was deemed lesser than full marriage would stigmatize the children of that union. Because the concept of civil union was clearly less than full marriage (see above), children of a same-sex union would be stigmatized. I am dismayed by the court’s lack of common sense: children of a same-sex couple are not going to be stigmatized by that couples’ standing before the law nearly to the extent of being stigmatized because the couple is homosexual

·      This leads to another observation: the language of the opinion is triumphant and uncompromising. That is, if you disagree with this notion, you are an outdated moral bigot. The SCOTUS has just declared open season on adherents of traditional marriage. I was personally surprised by this because it does NOT seem to reflect the personality of Justice Kennedy, someone who I have met and chatted with

·      The decision explicitly calls out the protections of the First Amendment for “… religions, those that adhere to religious doctrines, and others ….” Well, we saw how well that worked out for bakers of wedding cakes so I’m not holding my breath

·      Lastly, there is nothing in the opinion that would prevent polygamous and/or polyandrous marriage. Several folks in Utah may be sharpening their legal pencils and within a day, several serious editorials were advocating going to that next step

Regardless, the matter is decided and will stand as law.

Many in the church have been confused about same-sex “marriage” and it seems to me they have confounded the authority of the government and strong public opinion with the authority of scripture. Yes, both public opinion and the law of our nation now affirm the legitimacy of same-sex “marriage.” But scripture does not.

Again, it seems to me well-interpreted scripture does not leave room for homosexual legitimacy any more than it leaves room for any other sexual sin. According to the Bible, homosexual behavior is sin. As such, homosexual behavior drives a wedge between a person and God just as far as theft, murder, dishonoring parents, and all other idolatries do. It is a different question altogether is homosexual behavior is more or less serious than those mentioned. Still, any sin separates us from God: murder and ‘polite’ lies have the same effect.

Further, scripture knows nothing of legitimate same-sex “marriage.” In both the Jewish and Christian scriptures, marriage is described as between genders and homosexual behavior is condemned. There will be lots of hip, cool, and savvy young evangelical Christians who want to challenge this conclusion, but it seems to me ultimately they will lose because the text itself doesn’t yield. To come to their place, they have to weaken, tweak, deconstruct, or flat out ignore the text. As a summary, there are about three scholarly arguments which attempt to deny the plain meaning of the relevant Biblical texts. Those arguments were demolished by a theological liberal in 2002. A fourth argument has come up, the "Trajectory" argument, but it loses, as well. Chat with me offline for details.

Here’s the deal, Church. We "lost." It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but we lost this one. Now – let’s be clear: while it seems like the church is the keeper of ‘civic morality,’ that really has never been the case. We have been fortunate to have been very influential, but the world will do its thing. In terms of the influence we seemed to have, we have lost this one. We will "lose" others in the future.

A few lessons from a talk that Darrel Bock gave back in November 2014 –

1. The church needs to learn how to lose these battles graciously. Alas, I expect to be disappointed in my brothers’ and sisters’ responses. And … here we go: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/06/25/christian-pastor-promises-to-set-himself-on-fire-if-gay-marriage-is-legalized-nationwide-audio/ There is a difference of expectation for behavior in general society and for followers of Jesus. Believers, calm down, do not over-react, and allow the fruit of the Spirit to bloom in your life; specifically: love, peace, patience, self-control, gentleness, goodness, kindness
2. We need to continue to preach and discipline about ALL sexuality. We need to encourage young marriages to get through the rough patches. We need to guide our youth through the hyper-sexualized culture we live in. We need to affirm God’s descriptions of thriving human relationships between genders. As Kevin Miller stated, we need to understand that following Jesus is “a culture of consistent sexual sacrifice.” Additionally, we need to preach and discipline our responses to failure, sin, and rebellion with the grace and mercy of the gospel. Abuse and violence against gays, just as abuse and violence against children of single parents, must be vigorously condemned. In other words, even though we have ‘lost,’ we need to advocate with every breath what God has told us about human thriving
3. At the same time, we need to understand and accept homosexuals as people who, very much like ourselves, desperately need Jesus. Just as for me, the best place for gay folk is in the pew hearing the good news about Jesus
4. We need to be patient. Abortion is a hideous thing. When Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973, we were in a similar position and the church ‘lost.’ But a curious thing happened on the way to 2015. Attitudes about abortion have shifted back. Even one of our most populist Presidents, Bill Clinton, once stated, “abortion should be safe, legal, and rare” (emphasis added). That was in 1996 and signaled the turning of the tide about abortion. Yes, abortion is still legal. Yet in the 40 years of our national experience with “safe” and “legal,” we are seeing the true costs. I am going out on a limb here, but suggest a similar experience with same-sex ‘marriage.’ In fifty years, we will see the true nature of this phenomena and the conclusion will not be positive
5. Again, it is important to guard our responses. Any believer's position on this matter is NOT a litmus test for their love of Jesus, their sanctification, or the effect of God's atonement in their life. There are a LOT of Jesus-loving, Bible-believing, heaven-going Christians who disagree with me. This does not mean we hate, ridicule, or marginalize each other. I need to heed this as well and (in the last week) have edited my initial post accordingly. This post seemed to hit many of the right notes for me: http://frankewellersblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/heres-why-your-pastor-didnt-say.html?m=1

Last thing: this is not the end of the world. When we all go to sleep tonight, the sun will come up in the morning and God will still be on the throne. Yes, the world is going to Hell in a handbasket – but it has been doing that for a long time. This is why the gospel of Jesus needs to be proclaimed and lived out. Christian: let’s concentrate on doing THAT.

Communicating Gospel Cross-culturally

Seems to me that given the general biblical illiteracy of the culture we find ourselves in, as well as the general inability of most people to think critically (most thinking seems to be more bumper-sticker or sound-bite polemic), we can't go to the Bible very quickly when we attempt to communicate the gospel to our Post-modern culture and society.

I read a Christian thinker a few years back who suggested that we need to become better Natural theologians rather than better Systematic theologians. What he meant by that is that we should get a better grip on Thomas Aquinas' massive thought-experiment that we now call Natural Theology. Aquinas' experiement went like this: we know Paul says in Romans 1 that everybody knows some pretty basic things about God. So using the evidence we have before us and our own reasoning power, just how far can we get along into our theology without having to rely on Jesus, the Apostles, or scripture? Aquinas got pretty far along, and while others that followed him thought he resorted to a couple of logical cheats to get there (unintentionally), still he made lots of interesting points.

The guy I read said we ought to do a similar, though not as intense thing. Can we converse with a dude in the epicenter of Portland "wierdness" (say on Hawthorne) about the existance - not of God - but of basic good and evil? Can we argue about the sanctity of life - not from Psalms - but from our own feelings towards children and infants? Can we argue about a creator - not from Genesis - but from the amazingly balanced world around us? And then, from there, can we make the move to point them to God, human uniqueness, and creation?

And even to a moral standard? Consider this exchange:
PoMo: "Dude, your metanarratives don't do it for me. I don't need somebody doing their power trip on me; telling me what's right and wrong."
XnDude: "OK, so let me ask you; do you have a sense of right and wrong?"
PoMo: "Sure I do."
XnDude: "Do you, according to your own standards, ever fail those standards?"
PoMo: "Yeah, 'course I do."
XnDude: "Then you -right there - agree with me that you are a 'sinner.'"

The thinker's point (who I mentioned before) was that if our culture denies us the use of scripture, we are not left without authority to speak. God has still given us an ordered world in which he is displayed. We can use that and build upon it to bring the specific good news about Jesus, salvation, and redemption.

What do you think? Would that play in the espresso shop on Hawthorne?

Acts 17 - Paul's Seeker Sensitivity: Rebuttal

So one of my friends gave me some good-natured push-back about my line of reasoning that Paul was "seeker sensitive" and "culturally relevant" (see the post on 20080708). My friend poked specifically at the Mars Hill discourse at Athens. The line of reasoning goes like this: Paul's attempt to be culturally relevant was ineffective: not many converts, no recorded church in Athens, and The Bible tells us so - look at the text! Therefore, we should jettison all this "culturally relevant" garbage and Preach The Word!

OK - certainly we should preach the Word. I'm not in any disagreement with that. But let's take another look at the text.

First, the evidence actually in the text doesn't support the proposition that Paul's cultural engagement was ineffective. Some people in Athens were converted, there were requests to hear more from Paul, and it's not surprizing that no church was recorded planted as Paul's mission wasn't to plant in Athens - he was on his way and Athens was a lay-over while he waited for Silas and Timothy. Finally, the scripture doesn't signal or otherwise indicate that Paul's work on Mars Hill was bad, ineffective, or inappropriate.

The real, larger, question that my friend is raising (of course) is one of 'cultural engagement.' Is Christ against culture, above culture, accomodated to culture, or in culture? Several of you will recognize those phrases as the premise of the book, "Christ In Culture" by R. Niebuhr - a very important work. His answer is that the best - and especially the most Biblical - answer is Christ in culture: the church engaged in society.

So, my friend's arguement - seems to me - is not as compelling as advertised and the larger issue (as well as the best Biblical answer) is that Paul was right to do what he did. By the way, my friend doesn't really hold his argument, he'd heard it from a mis-guided fundamentalist.

Those are my thoughts.

Gospel, Culture, and Church?

I was listening the other day to a Portland-area Christian guru type. He said that he’d done some reading and came across a model that he shared and that got me thinking a bit.
The model is how gospel, culture and church interact. My apologies, Rick, if I didn’t get this right, but this is what I came away with…

We start with the gospel. The gospel interacts with culture (really “society”). What happens when the gospel effectively engages society? People come to Jesus – that’s a good thing! Those new believers group together because the both want to and should do. That leads to a church.
The next thing to notice is that the church then goes back to the gospel. This is a continuous thing – the church always has to remind itself of what the gospel is while staying connected to its birthing society.

Now get this part: the gospel is above both church and culture – neither the culture or the church “own” the gospel (this is what our Roman church friends miss), however the church’s function is to posses and use the gospel in culture.

Note the progression: the gospel interacts with society and a church is the result – the church is a child of both the gospel (which is easy for most Christians to see) AND the culture (which causes most Christians to squirm a little). This is important to grasp: each individual church is a product of its community, society, and culture. By the way, most PoMos get this immediately.
And, for evangelicals, this should sound right. After all, we keep saying that we want to present the timeless truths of the gospel in the relevant language of the world in which we now live. The same applies to a particular church.

Also note that the church is interacting with BOTH gospel and culture. If the church ceases to interact with the gospel and only engages culture, it presents (at best!) as “watered down gospel.” I would argue that such a church presents no gospel at all. For evangelicals of the last half of the 20th century, this is what we think happened to the Liberal wing of the church. Some evangelicals are concerned that certain segments of the emerging-emergent church are going down the same path.

If the church stops interacting with the society and culture, it is also guilty of sin: we have held our fists up to God in disobedience to both the Second Greatest commandment and the Great Commission. The church becomes insular and ineffective. There can be no impact without contact.

R. Neibuhr present four models of Christ In Culture as it relates to the church: 1) Church against culture, 2) Church accommodating to culture, 3) Church over culture, and 4) Church in culture. Rick’s model touched on three of these. A church disconnected from society is Christ against culture. A church disconnected from gospel is Christ accommodated to culture. A church engaged in both gospel and culture is Christ in culture. While Neibuhr was quick to say that each of the models he developed had biblical support, the best understanding was that of Christ in culture. That is, the church engaged with both gospel and its society.

An Atheist's Rage

Man, I was annoyed. Friday night my daughter Irene came into the room in tears because of an email she’d just received. Now Irene is a pretty tough gal and so it takes a lot to get her rattled. So what was the email about? Some catty girls dissing on her, some terrible news tragedy? No, it was one of her school ‘friends’ decided to rant on Christians. Hmmm. The previous version said that the guy was angry because his parents were fighting and needed to ‘rant.’ The revised blog can be found here.

Now my first reaction was that “this punk is gonna feel some PAIN: he made my girl cry, he’s gonna pay!” That feeling, BTW, was still floating around and was inevitably expressed here. The next reaction was to read the email for content and ignore all the flaming language. Once analyzed, I could coach my daughter into refuting the arguments presented with objective facts and conclusions. That would make me feel better because it would confirm that I’m smart and this punk (there I go again) is really rather stupid, uninformed, or both. But that would be rather infantile of me. The third reaction is to note a teenager in great pain: he feels alone (copy that), alienated, and his parents (the two most important people in his life) are in conflict. It was a long time ago, but I remember how I felt when my folks were fighting – it was not a “happy place.”

First, let’s dispense with the Father’s Rage part: if you’ll notice, Irene has shown herself to be a ‘contagious Christian’ in that this guy admits that she’s one of the few self-reporting Christians who seems to actually be Jesus-like. As a father, I’m rather proud of my little girl for that.

Second, let’s dispense with the arguments that young Mr. Punk has advanced. There are plenty of atheists on MySpace and the general blogsphere. Even more to the point, there are plenty of Christian-haters out here. But why are all the Christians proclaiming from the rooftops: “I’m a Christian and I’m not afraid to show it?” Well, there’s the implied fear from showing oneself as being a Christian. Why? Because emails and blogs like young Mr. Punk’s come out and trash on them! People say that Christians are intolerant – well intolerance is sure not limited to Christians. It’s a pretty natural reaction to get defensive in the face of an attack. Why are Christians “afraid?” Why, it’s because of people like you, young Mr. Punk: you rant on them, and intimidate them, and attack them.

But why are Christians so big on telling people that they’re Jesus-people? Well, in spite of the attacks they receive, Christians really believe that they have – from Jesus himself – The Message that will transform your life like it has theirs. They’ve experienced something … wonderful! … that defies what we usually see in our world. They are trying to get that news out. They are so excited about the overwhelmingly positive consequences of this information that they’re willing to go out on a blogspace limb and say: “Lookit, lookit! See what I’ve found!!”

In my opinion, it takes more courage to stand in the blogsphere and declare: “I have a message that you won’t agree with or want to hear. But it’s so important that I’m willing to get the inevitable flaming emails (like this) that will result.” On the other hand, there’s no courage in going with the flow: “smoking, drinking, and f***ing,” as Mr. Punk says his friends are doing.

The other thing to remember, young Mr. Punk, is that Jesus himself was pretty clear that not everyone who self-reports to be a “Christian” really is one. For you Bible-people out there, I remind you of Matthew 25:31-46. In fact, Christians are told they must examine themselves (though never told to examine others) to see if they are really born-again fully-devoted followers of Jesus (check out the little book of 1 John).

As to young Mr. Punk’s conclusion that our fear of the unknown after death compels us to do good; I think Mr. Punk is right. That God has arranged life so that death is an unknown is a powerful motivator for people to search and grope for him. Looking at death, we see some powerful truths: “I am not ready. Not only that, I’m sure I’ll never be ready. After death, there’s God waiting and it’s clear from what I see in this world that God is holy and has standards that I’ve not met.”

I need help. As Mr. Punk has rightly pointed out; I need a crutch. What The Message says is that Jesus died as a substitute for the spiritual consequences of my inability to meet the standards. Jesus then brought himself back to life to confirm his claims. If I rely on Jesus to pay for those lapses, then God will say (since he set it up in the first place), “Good, you’re seeing things from my perspective now. Come with me and let’s get started on some other good things.” God doesn’t promise prosperity, popularity, or that those dearest to you will get along – though that often happens. He does offer you new life in a community of fellow travelers. But let me repeat this very clearly for you, Mr. Punk: I definitely need a crutch. And that crutch’s name is Jesus.

Mr. Punk, God has arranged the world along a fine balance. There’s just enough information to compel a good mind to see and accept God and there are seemingly good reasons to reject that God is there. It is so finely balanced that God has left it up to your choice. And God will give you your desires. If you desire to be with him, he will receive you with open, welcoming arms. He will put you into a ‘forever family’ of people who really will be able to say, “Amen!” You’ll have no need to fear death because your position with God is secure because of what Jesus did for us.

But if you choose to reject God, then God will give you your desires: If you don’t want to have anything to do with God, then after you die you will have nothing to do with God. Do you remember what we call a place where there is no God? Sure you do. This is what we call that place: “Hell.” That’s the other thing: God doesn’t put people in hell, people choose to go there.

Finally, I am so sorry that your parents were fighting. I’m getting a bit misty-eyed even as I’m writing this. I wish I could give you assurance that everything will be OK. In reality, I can’t; because I don’t have the power to change your parents. But this is what I read in your pain-filled email: “I’m hurt and there are people out there who tell me that there’s an answer, a treatment, a way that will be better. But most of them are really messed up, just like me. How can I trust them?” I find it significant that in your pain, you turn your anger on Christians. I wonder … are you angry at Christians because they are somehow responsible for your pain? Or are you angry at Christians because you’re a lot closer to them: in our agony we frequently strike out at the ones who are closest to us.

What if God, who desperately loves you and has been trying to get through to you, is banging on the door of your life to get your attention? Is it possible that God might have used your parents’ argument to compel you to come a little closer to the people with The Message that you need to hear? I’m not suggesting that God caused the argument, but just that he is nudging on your heart because of that event. There are people in your life – you’ve already identified them – who want to help you make a good choice.

God does not want you to chose to reject him. The results are catastrophic.

Choose well.