Plausibility and Unbelief

Bart Ehrman, the Moody and Wheaton grad turned apostate, delights in explaining the "reasons" why biblical Christianity cannot be true. Not long ago I heard him being interviewed on NPR's 'Fresh Air.' Ironic title that. As he spoke the atmosphere grew noticeably stale.
One of his arguments majored on the number of Christians in every generation who believed the Lord would come in their lifetime. Inside Prof. Ehrman’s formidable brain this constitutes a kind of “proof” which delegitimizes faith. For some reason the same phenomenon inclines me toward the opposite conclusion.
Is it not striking that the center and burden of prophecies separated from us by a distance measured in millennia should remain so frightfully current? That there could be multi-generational scenarios which plausibly fuel biblical hope is itself a kind of verification of Christianity’s truth claims. In the last few days three issues dominate the news-cycle:
1) The Israeli Prime Minister has conceded the possibility of a Palestinian State.
2) The validity of the reelection of a particularly rabid anti-Jewish savage in Iran is being disputed.
3) Al-Qaeda and the Taliban continue their grisly work of theologically inspired murder, including aid workers (women and children among them) in Yemen none of whom were American.
Does anybody still remember why these stupefying fiends began to hate us in the first place? It was because of an American presence on the Arabian peninsula. And it was because of an American sympathy for Israel.
Why do the heathen rage, and the peoples imagine a vain thing?
What are the chances that the relevance of prophecies about Israel would survive the passage of time when Israel itself did not survive between 70 and 1948 AD? It would be an odd coincidence that current geo-political realities could be construed by ingenious exaggeration to adhere so closely to ancient prophetic forecasts.
Yet they do.
Israel matters.
Jerusalem matters, not just to the Jews and not just to those who live nearby.
There are two kinds of hearts. One believes the witness and opens itself up to what God is saying and showing in all ages. Such hearts incline toward a reverent but (hopefully) also sober and even scholarly calibration of what God proclaims in Scripture and what God performs in history.
By human reckoning two thousand years is a long time to wait for Jesus to come back. Just so two thousand years is also a long time to sustain any resemblance between the world of 2009 and the world now buried in the abyss of time where the original prophecies were uttered. In fact we are warned not to measure this particular expectation in terms of human notions of time. With the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day...
The Lord is not slow about His promise as some count slowness...
Forty days was too long for some to wait on Moses to return from the Mountain. There were skeptics then though they'd been favored with the spectacle of miracles. There are skeptics now though some, like Professor Ehrman, have been favored with study at places like Moody and Wheaton.
The cleavage between the believing and the skeptical constitutes a divide more profound than that between the genders or the races.
One group will see the sky opened.
In Moses' generation the other group saw the opening of the ground.

A Phenomenon at Sunset

Every three years Inter-Varsity holds a meeting on the campus of the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. The goal is to encourage students to give themselves to Great Commission enterprises. I urged a group of new Christians to attend Urbana ‘76 with confidence they would be bowled over by at least one of the two great speakers featured that year. When they returned they could only rave about Helen Roseveare. I was mystified. I’d never heard of HR. Of course I asked for tapes. After listening I became a serious fan.

In 1983 the Ben Lippen Conference in Asheville, North Carolina, hosted Helen Roseveare at one of their Summer Conferences. Sadly Ben Lippen Conference is no more. It was operated by Columbia Bible College which is now called Columbia International University. In Britain Inter-Varsity has changed its name to Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship. This year the meeting will be in St. Louis not Urbana. The trend toward name-changes among Churches and Christian Institutions is rampant. My own Mission, ‘Entrust’, used to be called BEE (Biblical Education by Extension) International. It’s a trend with which I sympathize having been sorely tempted to change my own name on numerous occasions. I don’t even have the option of retreating to the more serious “Ronald” as “Ronnie“ is the name on my birth certificate. Those of us born in the American South are often saddled with the names of young children which must be borne through adulthood. Just ask Billy Graham. In one Church I was informed that I would have to abandon “Ronnie” because it didn’t fit the sophisticated international city where I’d just landed. Initially I leaped at this opportunity. The prospect of having a name consonant with a nature as romantic and intellectual as my own (so obvious to all who know me) as well as a name worthy of that great city excited me immensely. Sadly I had to give it up in the end. However much I admitted the need, and however much I wanted to go through life being called “Sebastian Paradise” or “Crispin St. Cyr” (those were the two finalists- I decided that if I was going to change my first name I should go ahead and change my surname as well) I couldn’t imagine that it would go down well on my visits back to Norcross, Georgia. Where I grew up we usually leave these prerogatives to the mom and dad. Inter-Varsity and Columbia Bible College were held back by none of the considerations which inhibited me and I wish them well.

But I digress.

After hearing Helen Roseveare speak six times on Jonah I concluded that she was the best speaker I’d ever heard. I knew it grated whenever I expressed that opinion. Comparisons, as Will Shakespeare noted, are odious. Plus she’s a woman. When I gave the Jonah tapes to a Marine Sergeant in our North Carolina Church he protested “Why are you giving me tapes by a woman?” I simply asked him to fasten his seat belt and pay attention. The next day he called and said “You told me about the seat belt; why didn’t you tell me about the crash helmet?” That Marine (who’d not attended college at the time) now holds a PhD and is on the Faculty at a Christian College. I like to think Helen Roseveare inspired him on his way.

It’s probably not wise to say that Helen Roseveare is the best speaker I’ve ever heard because of the way the opinion provokes controversy and comparisons. Better to say she moves me more than anyone I’ve ever heard. The question is “why?” Three things stand out:

First: Great gifts. This is pretty much a commonplace. We would expect great gifts from those invited to speak at Urbana. We run into great gifts fairly often though we’d like to encounter them even more. She is a gifted thinker. She is a gifted theological processor and, supremely, she is a gifted speaker. Her sense of dramatic moment, intonation and emphasis are perfectly calibrated and combine for maximum effect.

Second: Great commitment. Her intellectual gifts earned her an MD from Cambridge University. Women had to be overqualified to be considered for Medical School in the 40’s. But it was her great commitment which brought her into the great danger where she made her impact. Instead of settling down into the middle class routine which physicians could expect in Post-War socialist Britain she set out for Africa. From 1953 to 1973 she practiced Medical Missions in the Belgian Congo which was later called Zaire which is now called Congo .(Our name change motif persists). She built a clinic in a place called Nebabongo where she embraced obscurity, danger and difficulty as a way of life.

The third great element is suffering. Great gifts plus great commitment plus great suffering. The first two we may frequently witness but how seldom the three in combination. We are all dealt a measure of suffering, but for her it has been GREAT suffering. Helen Roseveare was kidnaped and tortured by rebel soldiers in the mid-sixties and during the five months of her captivity was subjected to ordeals worse than death.

In that crucible was forged a witness to Christ’s sufficiency in the cruelest of situations. She faced her agony with this prayer, repeated like a refrain in a hymn of praise:
“Lord, I thank You for trusting me with this experience, even though You haven’t chosen to tell me the reason why.”

Two years ago I told some fellow-missionaries that HR was the best. It never occurred to me that we should invite HR to our next Conference for the same reason it never occurred to me to invite the Beatles to my birthday party. I thought it would be overreaching. I knew it would be futile. But two of my colleagues did invite her and she accepted. And so we heard her in Sopron Hungary on April 22-26. When she was invited neither she nor we knew that Sopron would be her last speaking engagement. It’s a decision we pray God overrules but the reality invested our time with a solemnity and sense of occasion we’d not anticipated. We heard Helen Roseveare in the sunset of what has been a remarkable career of faithfulness to the King of Kings.

I thank God for Helen Roseveare. And I thank God that the state of media technology in the 20th and 21rst Centuries make it possible to hear her voice after retirement.

I wish I could have heard the voices of Edwards and Whitefield and Spurgeon.

But the voice of Helen will suffice.

Passing It On

Skip and Barbara Ryan were the featured speakers at the first annual Danube International Church Retreat in Cserkeszőlő, Hungary April 17-19. Skip is the Chancellor of Redeemer Theological Seminary in Dallas.

His messages connected here. We don’t want to hoard the insights in our part of the world. They need to be circulated. Here are some thoughts which appealed to me especially:

Fear is a refusal to live in the present.
It costs us much to lose everything but when we lose everything we begin to live.
While you’re lying to God you can’t experience His love.
Adversity introduces me to myself.
Every addiction leads to stealth. And stealth makes betrayal inevitable.
It is the love of Christ which breaks us.
Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die (I’d heard this said of blame).
Humility was not considered a virtue in the ancient world. For Paul to elaborate upon Christ’s great humility in emptying himself and refusing to cling to the prerogatives of Deity (Phil. 2:4-11) was counter-cultural to a considerable degree.
Manual labor was not considered an acceptable occupation for a man of consequence. For Paul to publicize that he made tents was equally counter-cultural.
What somebody else thinks of me is none of my business.

Personally I find the first and last insights to be the most provocative. I find the last to be especially liberating. It’s one thing to be reminded (as we often have been) that we oughtn’t to worry about what other people think. It delivers a fresh jolt to be told that what others think is actually none of our business!

One confirmation of Christian truth comes when we meet people of widely divergent backgrounds who share the same experience of having the core of their personality and history dissected and defined by what Scripture reveals .That happens when we compare notes with our other believers. Further confirmation comes when we see a commonality of experience with those figures we encounter in Holy Scripture. It is certainly possible to gain marvelous insights about human personality when we read other ancient literature like the Odyssey or the Aeneid. But the Bible takes us to another level. Those other ancient writings do not unmask and convict us. Nor do we find in them the power to effect personal transformation.

The proper word a (bit overused in recent years) is resonance. Much of our shared experience would remain static, discrete, random and ultimately lost if not clarified by the infinite reference point which is the Word of God mediated by the Spirit of God. Skip led us in those kind of shared discoveries and affirmations. For that we are grateful.

And from that we share.

The Power of Pop Culture

Wednesday night Beyoncé performed at the Sport Palace in Budapest. Earlier that day I boarded a train for the Czech Republic. In my early youth I would have cursed my fate. At age 58 I simply view it as good timing. I’m not familiar with Beyoncé’s music, but I did catch her in the first Pink Panther movie which starred Steve Martin. Probably Beyoncé is not familiar with Exodus 3. If she were she would not have called her spring travels the “I Am Tour”. At least I hope she wouldn’t. Seems I remember that in 2008 Beyoncé and her husband earned only slightly less than the gross domestic product of Paraguay. Such is the power of Pop.

Speaking of the new Inspector Clouseau, a Christian leader who never comments on my sermons rushed forward to congratulate me for quoting Steve Martin in my opening remarks a few Sundays ago. (A banjo was featured in our worship that morning.) That kind of thing happens quite often. People are more likely to talk about something not related to the exposition of Scripture. A wonderfully effective women’s teacher once confided to me that nearly 100% of the women who wanted to speak with her after she taught were seeking counsel on personal and family problems. They almost never registered interest in implications and applications from the text. Of course, if we hope to help anyone with their problems we’d better be ready with implications and applications from the text. It’s always amazed me that if I mention a film or a line from a song it almost never fails to elicit comment.

Popular culture is a force to be reckoned with. It is often a negative thing. It can be a neutral thing. It is seldom a positive thing, though its lessons can be shaped for edifying purposes by thoughtful believers. I realize that I too am influenced by popular culture, but I hope not as much as I used to be. I have no desire to listen to Beyoncé, but I’m glad I saw the Beatles live when I was 14. When I was a university student I had not one but two posters of Bob Dylan on my wall. Almost any jingle-jangle morning I would have followed him. Then one day I realized he wasn't kidding when he sang "...there is no place I'm going to” (Mr. Tambourine Man). Whether the change came about because I became a Christian or because I was growing up, I don’t know; maybe it was a bit of both.

As far as ministry in the 21st century goes we may take more than one approach to popular culture. Some churches gauge the direction of the cultural wind and begin to pedal hard in that direction. We may congratulate them for their alertness. But there’s a difference between heeding and leading. Those churches are much more likely to show a clip from a film than they are to quote from someone like Augustine or Calvin. Another approach is to always learn from culture but never give in to it. It is prudent and it is sometimes necessary to note cultural markers which a majority of the congregation are thinking about. Then, having duly noted those cultural influences which affect our thinking, we give ourselves to the hard task of bringing every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

I vote for option two.

Between Sunday and Friday

Someone (if you know who tell me) said that civilization is a thin veneer stretched across an ocean of barbarism.
Is it just me or is the fabric of civilization fraying?
Seven maniacs have gunned down over 50 Americans in the last 30 days. And that’s only the mass shootings. A few hours ago pirates captured an American vessel which has at this moment been retaken by its crew.
It’s almost Easter.
In years past I asked my Congregation the same question on Palm Sunday. Did Israel go from civilization to barbarism in the space of five days? How could the same crowd which hailed the Lord in adulation on Sunday demand His execution on Friday? The question is complex, but I now believe it was misconstrued. Complex because we can’t be sure how many of the same people who shouted “Hosanna” on Sunday shouted “Give us Barabbas” on Friday.
The Chief Priests allied with the Pharisees would have been perfectly capable of producing a rent-a-crowd at a moment’s notice on the Friday morning. But the mood on the street could actually have turned against Jesus as well.
I believe the question was misconstrued because I’m no longer sure the crowd did change. The word Hosanna means’ Lord Save!’ The tragedy is that most who shouted the word weren’t pleading for the salvation Jesus of Nazareth came to offer. They didn’t mean “Deliver us from the dread power sin has over us, because we have transgressed against the God of Israel and cannot save ourselves.” It was rather “Throw the Romans out. Remove the heel of Rome from the neck of Israel.” It was a political and military deliverance they were after. In short they craved the solution Barabbas was offering.
On Palm Sunday with Jerusalem at a fever pitch the Greeks asked for a word with Jesus. At the critical moment there came a word from Jesus: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies it abides alone. But if it dies it bears much fruit.” We are prone to abstract those words from their context and preserve them in memory as a kind of general spiritual principle. But in context Jesus was speaking about Himself. He came not to kill the enemies of Israel but to die for them. That wasn’t quite what the crowd had in mind
Jesus’ plan of salvation must be paramount. It supplants all salvation strategies of our own devising. The Gospel stands alone. By its very nature it can never be one choice among many.
Timothy Keller has observed that the Lord Jesus left us with a choice most stark: “Crown Me or kill Me.”
The Friday mob made its choice.
We must make ours as well.
The Cross is still our only hope 2000 years after The Event.
To embrace the message of the Cross is to make God our Father and Heaven our home.
Anything less means the Abyss.

Marriage in the Second Half

Jane and I were married in West Point , Virginia 32 years ago today. It’s conceivable that I will be alive at age 91. If I actually survive until then (along with my bride) then we’ve not yet entered the second half. But it’s a safe bet we’re more than half done already. Some of our wedding guests expected to tour the Military Academy . Whether any were serious or not I couldn’t tell . There’s that other West Point in New York where Lee and Macarthur studied. There were some present then not with us now. Most sorely missed are our two dads. We flew to London for the honeymoon. First because my father offered to pay and, secondly, because we thought we would never have the chance to cross the ocean again on a minister’s salary. A baggage handler’s strike at Heathrow compounded the trans-Atlantic exhaustion. Our driver couldn’t find the hotel. It snowed the day we arrived as it snowed in Budapest this morning. I had no coat.
Southerners eventually learn.
I wish everyone I know were as blessed in marriage as I. I want to talk about it more often but am always afraid 1) It will sound like boasting 2) It will make those formerly married or unhappily married uncomfortable. My happiness in marriage is due to Jesus and Jane --in that order,
Jesus launched His ministry of miraculous signs at a wedding. After His baptism He stood where Adam fell by resisting the devil in the wilderness. Adam and Eve did not eat the fruit because they were hungry. They were not hungry. They could eat from any tree in the Garden save one. They ate the fruit because they believed a lie about God. Adam sinned on a full stomach. The Second Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ refused to turn stones into bread even though He was starving. When we track the chronology of the Gospels we see that Jesus was baptized in Matthew 3, tempted in Matthew 4, walked back to the scene of His baptism in John 1 then walked toward Cana into John 2.So He traveled from the wilderness to the wedding In the wilderness He refused Himself bread though He was starving. At the wedding He gave others wine though they had drunk. Bread is a necessity. Wine is a luxury. He granted luxury to others while denying necessity to Himself Surely this is the model for every husband. Surely Jesus is the perfect Bridegroom (John 3:29) .After He rehabilitated the moral possibilities for Man by succeeding where Adam failed He set out on a rescue mission for marriage. When Adam and Eve sinned marriage fell with the rest of Creation. There was shame and there was blame. Shame and blame would have been imminent in Cana once the wine was gone.
The wine can run out in any marriage if we are left to our own resources. That’s a place God never intended to leave us. Jesus was invited to Cana . And when He is invited into marriage He makes Himself available to meet every legitimate need. Sometimes we ask and He appears to delay. When Mary declared they’d run out of wine I can only trace a “no” in His response. Somehow Mary heard a “yes”. At that moment she gives the servants the greatest counsel ever uttered in the history of the world. “Do everything He tells you” she says.Could there be any greater counsel than that?
Ours is to apply, obey and wait, even when the wait is agonizingly long (though those first century guests didn’t wait long). His part is to bless and provide.
Jane and I have reaped the benefits of His unfailing presence and undeserved blessing for a very short 32 years.
The headwaiter marveled that the best wine was saved for last.
That’s a precedent for joy in the second half.

Atheism and One Frail Presumption

I find it possible to sympathize with the agnostic (though not with agnosticism). How can you argue with a man who says he doesn’t know? You can only agree and ask for the privilege of helping. One beggar telling another where he has found bread. Of course there are two kinds of agnostics. There is the tentative agnosticism of indecision which confesses merely “I don’t know.” Then there is the dogmatic agnosticism of arrogance which declares that the fact of God’s existence cannot be known. The second is, of course, but atheism thinly disguised. And for atheism we have no sympathy. The atheist we may regard. But to his views we offer no quarter. Let us consider one of the bedrock arguments which issues from that school.
The most obvious problem with atheism is that it accounts for nothing. How intellectually engaged people can be attracted to a system which can account for nothing at all escapes me, but there it is. Sartre, himself an atheist, had the courage to admit that the greatest philosophical problem is why there is something rather than nothing. You bet that’s a problem for atheism .And how. And an insoluble one at that. But the objection is deftly countered by proponents of the New Atheism Chic. Led by the likes of Professor Dawkins they respond:
“Of course we cannot account for the existence of the material universe. But neither can theists account for the existence of God. So the problems are equivalent. We are stymied then, and the score is a tie.”
But the score is not tied. The two “problems” -as a moment’s reflection will demonstrate - are manifestly not equivalent.
It was Aristotle (no evangelical he) who insisted that mind was much more likely to produce non-mind (or lesser minds) than non-mind was likely to produce mind. And Aristotle was absolutely right.
Dawkins’ difficulty (which he freely admits) is that he is not able to conceptualize God. He simply cannot imagine an uncreated Creator. And he begs that we not believe in God for that very reason viz. that he, Professor Dawkins, cannot imagine God. Forgive me if I don’t find that a compelling reason for unbelief.
Is it necessary for lesser creatures to comprehend the superior qualities in a higher creature (in this case the Creator) for those qualities to be validated? A dog may not be able to comprehend a good deal about a man: e.g. how a man can ride a bicycle, play a piano or read a newspaper? Is it rational to argue that the incomprehensibility of those capacities at a lower level of creation in any way vitiates their reality? That would be foolish in the extreme would it not? But it is exactly that kind of foolishness which Professor Dawkins asks us to base our convictions about ultimate questions upon.
To illustrate let us return to Aristotle’s principle.
The atheist asks us to believe that by a kind of spontaneous auto-generation the inanimate components of the universe appeared (this is so obviously far-fetched that the atheist sometimes pleads the eternal existence of matter- a proposition itself just as unlikely).These inanimate components SOMEHOW randomly combine to produce –Voila! - entities infinitely complex: quasars and neurons and ganglia and peacocks and other phenomena wondrous to behold. And we are asked to believe that such a thing is ACTUALLY MORE LIKELY than the alternative that a supernatural Creator is at the back of everything. Now let us break the argument down analogically and test its plausibility.
Consider for a moment Michelangelo and the ‘David’, the sculptor and his sculpture. There are certain inanimate components in the art. There is stone and color. There are certain animate components in the artist. There is brain and blood. Which is more likely, that the components in the art produced the artist or that the components in the artist produced the art? If you protest that the analogy is not proximate I maintain that this is PRECISELY the argument the atheist proffers.
And the argument is arrant nonsense.
The problems are not equivalent.
The score is not tied.
There is intelligence in the universe because there is a Mind behind it all.
There are extant components of personality because a personal God created what is there.
Love suffuses our being because love was the motive for Creation.
A marvelous patient love which is willing to endure even the most contemptible assaults on the reality of the Lover.
But we are told that even divine endurance has limits.