Couldn't Help Noticing

A Bible for all of life

In our chat around the coffee machine the other morning, Karen told me about her reading of The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce by Judith Wallenstein.

I read the story of someone whose name was Karen, as it happens, said Karen, although that probably wasn't her real name. Anyway, after her parents' marriage fell apart, her mother basically just collapsed. And Karen was forced into the role of looking after everyone. She basically became mum, and looked after all her siblings and ran the house. And eventually became a teacher specializing in kids with learning difficulties. It was natural to her. And then of course she married this guy who was completely dependent on her. Apparently this is quite a common pattern among children of divorce.

I'm just wondering, said Karen. With someone like Karen, does it do her any good to come to church and hear a sermon about sacrifice, and laying down your life for others? Doesn't it just reinforce a behaviour pattern that for her has become unhealthy?

The answer, of course, is that a lacerating sermon on commitment and sacrifice is probably not what Karen (the italicised one, I mean) needs to hear. She's lacerated enough already. She's more in need of a reminder about justification by faith—that Jesus has already done all the sacrificing that is necessary. We can't sacrifice our way into God's favour. When we rest—as we need to—we are adding our own passive exclamation mark to what Jesus has already achieved.

And I would probably also want the over-committed, self-immolating Karen to be taught about God's sovereignty. He can do everything; we cannot. In view of his sovereignty, when we have done all that we can reasonably do, we should remove our supposedly indispensable selves to the lounge and take a chill pill (as my teenage daughter puts it).

But what if Karen's church doesn't preach much on these things? She should find a church that does—a church, in other words, that works its way through the Bible, allowing the full light of the Bible's teaching, in all its facets, to shine into the nooks and crannies of our lives.

The wonderful thing about the Bible is that it addresses reality—in both its simplicity and complexity. Its moral demand on us is, in one sense, simple and universal: love God and love your neighbour. No-one is exempt from this, and no-one has a higher obligation than anyone else. It's a truth that addresses every one of us identically. And yet the landscape in which we live out this singular command is complex and varied, and as individuals we are complex and varied. To speak the language of ethics, the moral field that confronts us is pluriform.

The Bible recognizes this. It speaks pastorally to different circumstances—giving a rocket to the lukewarm in one passage, and sweet assurance to the tender conscience in another; requiring us to stand out as godly beacons of difference in one instance, and to give way in all-things-to-all-men flexibility in another; condemning the futility of works-based righteousness in one place, and the foolish presumption of faith-without-works in another.

This is why we must read all of the Bible, and preach all of the Bible. It is also why preachers must work hard in their application of each text, showing how its truth applies to different circumstances, personalities and spiritual conditions. I suspect some of our evangelical forebears—notably the Puritans—were rather better at this than we are today.

Your faith rests in a football stadium?

Be warned. Your next apologetical defense of Christianity may have to come in the form of counting the number of people standing in a football stadium.

On March 4th, The Discovery Channel will air ‘The Lost Tomb of Jesus’. The documentary is on the 1980 discovery of a tomb in Jerusalem. The ossuaries in the tomb had several names inscribed: Jesus, son of Joseph, two Marys, another Joseph, Matthew and Judah. The documentary is supposed to investigate the possibility of this being the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth.

Of course, this is nothing new. The connection was made upon the tomb's discovery over 25 years ago. What is new, according to the documentary, is DNA testing, which will be used to hypothesize the connection between the people in the tomb.

Noted talk show host Larry King invited several interested parties to discuss this on his show (view the transcript). It is quite an interview as secular scholars, journalists and theologians go head to head on the issue.

Thankfully, King called on respected evangelical Al Mohler to represent Protestant Christianity. In an exchange, Mohler and James Tabor—a professor of religion—discuss the statistical probability of more than one Jesus having the same familial names as Jesus of Nazareth:

TABOR: You know, I will tell you, Dr. Mohler, if you had a football stadium with 50,000 people and you had all of the Jesuses stand up, it would be 3,000. So that's somewhat common. If you said, how many of you had a mother named Mary? It would go down to 397. If you said, how many have a father named Joseph? It would go down again. And then if you say, a brother named James or Simon, it gets down to one person with just four questions ... But do you think there would more than one Jesus left standing after four questions would be the question. I don't think there would be, because from what I have been told by the stats, that's the math. A father, mother and a brother is going to take you down to a single person.

[Curiously, as Mohler points out, Tabor has written an entire book arguing that Joseph was not Jesus' father.]

Mohler, among others, believes this is all sensationalism based on pseudo-science, revisionist history and unfounded statistical analysis. Still, it's worth following the science and statistics of this debate because it is an issue on which Christianity stands or falls (1 Cor 15). Further, it's good to have an answer if people start asking, “How many Jesuses are in your stadium?”

[P.S. Historical Jesus scholar Ben Witherington has a good summary of the scientific and statistic problems on this issue.]

Better a hypocrite than a man who fears God?

Michael Portillo, a former Conservative Party MP and Cabinet member, writing in the Sunday Times on the weekend, opened his article with this extraordinary, attention-grabbing paragraph:

When last week David Cameron [the current Conservative leader] revealed that he hopes his daughter will go to a Church of England school, his aides rushed to say that he attends Sunday worship in Kensington not as a ploy to help her chances but out of genuine religious conviction. I would be more reassured to hear that the Tory leader goes to church because that is what it takes to get a child into the best of state schools, not because he is a believer.

As Al Mohler points out in his blog, “Mr. Portillo clearly would prefer Mr. Cameron to be a hypocrite than a believer in God.”

Portillo makes the extraordinary claim that God-fearers (and he cites Blair and Bush as his examples) are dangerous, because they are concerned about God being their guide and their judge. He claims that “[t]hose who look for judgment not from the electorate or parliament or a free press but from God release themselves from the constraints of democracy.”

Such a release will come as something of a surprise to Blair and Bush, who no doubt continue to strongly feel the political consequences of their decision-making. Perhaps any lessening of their anxiety over being judged by the electorate springs more from their imminent retirements from politics.

Portillo shows the paucity of his understanding of religious differences when he says:

Britons should worry that religion and politics could again be bound together. If moderation and secularism have been overturned in parts of the Muslim world, why should not the same thing happen in Christian societies?

The answer is, of course, that Christianity is different at its very core to Islam, even if politicians and the media continue with the nonsense of suggesting that “fundamentalism” of any religion is the danger. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali has said, “the basic tenets of Islam and the basic tenets of Western liberal democracies are incompatible”. That is not the case with Christianity; rather, Christianity has a strong claim to being the source of many of the principles of Western liberal democracy, including the separation of church and state.

Portillo's views need to be challenged and questioned. He puts forward the proposition that “it is fundamental to our society's survival that most people should distinguish good from bad”, without giving any indication of how he proposes to assess what constitutes good and bad.

Portillo goes on to say: “My guess is that historians will look back on the early 21st century in puzzlement. How was it possible, they will ask, that man had such deep scientific understanding but clung so tenaciously to his gods?”

His problem, of course, is that by looking only to science, he will not find help in distinguishing between good and bad. Perhaps that provides a clue for him as to why people cling to their gods.

The Bible rings with the message that true wisdom begins with the “fear of the Lord”. But it doesn't end there. God-fearing politicians worth their salt know that. Such people do not need to be feared. Far more dangerous are the politicians who only fear the electorate and the parliament and the free press; they are the ones, who, given the right conditions, may well corrupt the elections, take a stranglehold on power, ban the free press, and then ravage their own people for their own selfish gain. Do I need to cite names from history?

To demonstrate the point, perhaps just go to see two new movies soon to hit our screens and contrast the one about William Wilberforce (Amazing Grace), with the other about Idi Amin (The Last King of Scotland).

Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace, the movie, opens in the US today, and looks like another promising evangelistic opportunity.

From the movie web site:

Ioan Gruffudd plays William Wilberforce, who, as a Member of Parliament, navigated the world of 18th Century backroom politics to end the slave trade in the British Empire. Albert Finney plays John Newton, a confidante of Wilberforce who inspires him to pursue a life of service to humanity. Benedict Cumberbatch is William Pitt the Younger, England's youngest ever Prime Minister at the age of 24, who encourages his friend Wilberforce to take up the fight to outlaw slavery and supports him in his struggles in Parliament.

As you could guess from the movie's title, the story behind the great hymn Amazing Grace is woven into this political story.

According to one early Christian review I've seen, the movie takes a few artistic licenses in some places, and reading John Piper's new book Amazing Grace in the Life of William Wilberforce would be very worthwhile in conjunction with seeing the movie.

As yet I have not been able to track down an Australian relese date.

Critical mass of Muslims

Professor Raphael Israeli of Hebrew University recently caused a stir in Australia when he asserted that “When the Muslim population gets to a critical mass you have problems. That is a general rule, so if it applies everywhere it applies in Australia.”

It's an observation based on his own research, so it's worth taking notice. I wrote an opinion piece for The Daily Telegraph, a local Sydney newspaper.