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Saturday, July 10th, 2010
“‘Scuse me, while I kiss the sky.” (Jimi Hendrix)
The average woman or man on the street – upon questioning – has quite a positive picture of Jesus in his or her mind. Surveys usually reveal people’s admiration for his compassion for the poor and downtrodden and his revolutionary teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (“turn the other cheek and all that”).
But when the cross is brought up, this admiration is swiftly transformed into evasiveness, bewilderment and even ridicule. People simply cannot conceive of why, after all the good he has done in his life, Jesus suddenly gets it into his head that he’d like to be noble and try and ‘save us from our sins’. Such ideas as ‘sin’ and ‘propitiation’ are considered barbaric, unworthy and unsophisticated today and so the (post)modern, secular person – who genuinely appreciates Jesus as a man and a teacher in many ways – is torn between embarrassment and mild offence whenever this subject of the cross is brought up.
Their demeanour says it all:
“C’mon Jesus, I think I get why this follower of yours in front of me is trying awkwardly to persuade me to ‘repent’ of my sins and trust in the ‘blood of Jesus’ which ‘washes all my sins away’… he is ignorant, he has misunderstood the mythology of the Bible, probably through a lack of education, and is taking it all too literally. But you, surely you should know better? This dying on the cross thing is beneath you and surely out of character for a man of your sophistication. Get down from the cross, you’re only embarrassing yourself and those of us who used to respect you. Help people in ways that you can; play to your strengths – teaching, showing compassion for the poor and sick, feeding people, giving them hope and leading the way in moral purity.”
Now perhaps you yourself have never said quite these words to Jesus in your head/heart but you would be the exception. I have seen the look that corresponds to these words countless times, even from people who continue to love and respect me despite my dependence on something so risible as the blood of Jesus.
We are told that postmodernism has created a more reflective modern man who is more humble and less self assertive than previous generations. In many ways I can affirm this, being myself a child of the postmodern academy. Yet for all this the self-assertiveness of men and women has not gone away and it never will, in our own strength, for it is buried deep within our hearts. And it manifests itself supremely in our response to the cross of Jesus.
The people in the gospel narrative – virtually to a man – all had this identical response to Jesus. They found that, in the light of his great moral stature, his presence on the cross offended their sensibilities and they demanded that he get down from the cross.
This is where the irony – both now and then – is absolute. Because were Jesus all of a sudden to jump down from the cross, healed and seeking the people who wrongfully tried to have him killed, we would then finally realise that we did indeed need to be saved — from him! For we were the ones who put him there.
It was Jesus’ attitude to sin and his assertion of his right to forgive sin that led people who had previously respected him to become complicit in his execution. This is describing you and me! The outrage we feel when Christians come to us telling us that we need Jesus to save us from our sins is the only confirmation that we need that, if we had been in the crowd in the first century, we too would have (whether wistfully or passionately) affirmed the call for Jesus to be stopped (ie. called for his blood).
Yet if we ‘could’ have been there and if Jesus ‘had’ in fact answered our request for him to stop embarrassing himself and get down from the cross then we would finally have realised – too late – what he was doing there in the first place. He was being judged in the place of arrogant, self-centred, God-hating people like you and me. Such a Jesus, who would come down from the cross, could only ever engender terror and despair in us as we realised that the wrath of God that was being poured down on Jesus on the cross was now being turned upon at us, it’s original and rightful recipients – and at our own behest no less! What a relief that Jesus did ‘not’, in fact listen to their jeers then, or ours today, which ‘dare’, challenge and beseech him to come down.
The only hope we can turn to in light of this we find described in Psalm 2 with the simple advice:
“Kiss the Son, lest he be angry”…
What you must understand is that there are actually two ways to kiss the son: there is Peter (who represents the authentic Christian believer [nb. who was originally most opposed to the cross cf. Mark 8]) and then there is Judas (anyone who has got to know Jesus but ends up scorning the cross and selling Jesus out).
Judas:
The person who asks Jesus to get down from the cross is being the same kind of friend to him as Judas, who respected him initially yet betrayed him when he realised that his destination was the cross – betrayed him with a kiss.
Peter:
The person who has understood the wrath of God against sin, however, through the wrath that the son ‘took’ on the cross for the sake of their sin, will fall before the son in fear and terror – fear and terror at the scandal of witnessing the God, there on the cross, who would deign to love and save someone as detestable as them. Their kiss would not be the Judas kiss of betrayal – of the one who sees no need for the cross and who thinks it diminishes Jesus’ glory and makes him unworthy of their worship. No, theirs is the kiss of devotion lavished on the one who loved them deeper than anything this world has ever seen, for he gave himself for them, his enemies, to save and redeem them and make them his brothers and sisters to share in his glory.
How will you kiss the Son?
Will you kiss him as Judas, the self-righteous, so-called friend who considered himself above the need for forgiveness from a holy and wrathful God…?
Or will you kiss him as Peter – a flawed, impetuous, hypocritical and weak person (as all Christians are) who was confronted with the scale of his own betrayal of Jesus, yet also with the even more tremendous love and mercy of Jesus which lifted him to his feet in forgiveness, bestowing dignity and honour upon him which he did not deserve, even as he threw himself to the floor in unworthiness…
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Charity and the Trinity
Sunday, May 30th, 2010
We demonstrate our true attitude towards God by our attitude towards the idea of charity.
On the surface, we all love the idea of charity. We give to charity, we claim to believe in it, we hold high hopes for it… but we find it very difficult to receive. And this demonstrates our real attitude not only towards charity, but towards God. Both practically in our lives and spiritually in our souls, we are simply too proud to accept help when we are down.
Perhaps we should revisit briefly the basic concept of Charity. For a start, charity is not just about giving money and offering practical assistance to organisations that help people who are downtrodden; neither is it merely about random acts of kindness by individuals. Although these things are certainly part of charity and flow from it, as the sum total of its meaning, they are no more than a caricature – a utilitarian reduction of charity to its lowest common denominator.
Yet somehow, even with this word being denuded of most of its meaning, we still understand the basic concept when we hear it – that it involves a kind of concern within the person offering the help that is not swayed in any way by the circumstance, loveliness, value or virtue of the one being helped… If we are to go deeper into the history of charity, we realise that this ‘concern’ is actually a kind of ‘love’. C.S.Lewis in his book ‘The Four Loves’ explains to us about the different kinds of love. There is στοργή (affection), φιλία (friendship), έρως (‘being in love’, as distinct from mere sexual fulfilment) and αγάπη (charity). The first three were recognised by the ancient Greeks, but charity, a self-giving love regardless of circumstance or the ‘loveliness’ and worthiness of the beloved, is a kind of love that is peculiar to the God of the Bible and is exemplified supremely in the person and work of Jesus Christ. It was Jesus who gave the greatest ever demonstration of charity when he – as God in the flesh – came to people who had rejected God and rescued them, while they were still rejecting him, by paying in his own body for their rebellion and wrongdoing as he died on the cross. The cross is the ultimate act of charity; it is the ultimate act of love given to the undeserving, unlovely and unworthy.
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:6-7)
And this is why we reject it! We don’t mind talking about the cross as an act of love – this sounds relatively harmless – but as an act of charity??? Who does God think we are?! Some poor, helpless souls who couldn’t help themselves…? What we don’t realise when we happily affirm that the cross is about God’s ‘love’ is that the love of God given to us in Christ on the cross IS charity; it is exactly the same thing to say that the cross is an act of charity as it is to say it is an act of love, for this is what God’s love (read: charity) looks like.
Yet by our reaction to hearing that the cross is ‘charity’, we display the true attitude of our hearts to God. For while we are perfectly happy to offer charity to others, we hate having to accept it, which means that we don’t actually believe in it. Charity for most of us is something that makes us look good; it is something that most of us ‘do’ but none of us actually ‘have’. When we hear that the ultimate act of charity is something that WE need, it makes our blood curdle, our toes curl and our hackles rise – and we hate God for presuming us to be so undeserving and lacking of our own merit, so unable to help ourselves… (Ironically, we tend to refer to our own acts of charity towards others to justify rejecting God’s charity towards us).
This all just goes to show how unlike Jesus we really are.. and how nonsensical it is for people like us to ask the question ‘what would Jesus do’. We might possibly be able to ascertain on a meagre few occasions what it is that Jesus would do, but because charity is not something we have, we could never actually do what Jesus did, even if we found out what it was, so it becomes a futile question for us to ask. At the end of the day, we demonstrate that charity is always something we force ourselves to do without ever really believing in it – for if we did believe in it we would have no problem accepting it for ourselves.
Yet somehow, the Bible calls Christians to exercise this kind of love – the assumption being that they can ‘possess’ this kind of charity love within themselves. How is this possible?!
Today being Trinity Sunday, I thought, I would attempt to offer a defence of charity as a specifically Christian virtue by highlighting its unique source – the Trinity – and showing how it is given to Christian believers to exercise authentically.
As Dan Hames brilliantly noted a few days ago love is neither a feeling, nor a choice in the first instance, but a way of being. We love sexually because chemically and biologically it is how we are made; it is part of who we are, not just what we feel or do. Similarly, we love our friends and family because “we are social animals by nature” (Plato) and friendship and family is the fabric which makes up our social structures. Apart from social structures, filial and familial love cannot exist.
But how about Charity love? Where does self-giving, no-strings-attached love spring from? The only answer that exists is The Trinity. Only the triune God of the Bible is a being who has existed, within his being, as a communion of three persons who have always, consistently and infinitely given themselves to one another. The one God, Father-Son-Spirit, is the only being whose charity can be witnessed as a way of being, meaning that his charity-love is not a choice or feeling or action imposed on himself, but it is who and what he is and always will be.
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:8)
A human receives this kind of love by being united to Jesus Christ, through faith in his death and resurrection.
Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature. (2 Peter 1:4)
What does it mean to ‘participate’ in the divine nature? It certainly doesn’t mean that our human nature fuses with God’s divine nature. This didn’t even happen in the incarnation! Rather, it means that through faith in Jesus we are adopted by God the Father and brought by the Holy Spirit into the communion of the Trinity. Once this happens, we too, like God, will exist in love as a way of being. This is what Jesus died to accomplish and rose to life to bring to fruition. He alone can bring us into the fellowship of the Trinity, that we may have a relationship with God that transforms who we are. As sons and daughters, existing in a fellowship with the only being for whom love is a way of being, we also produce this same love, since it flows from our new identity and our union with Christ.
Charity is what makes every other kind of love possible. 1 Corinthians 13 is read out at weddings, which usually means that people miss that it is not talking about eros love but about charity, the love which makes eros-love possible.
Next time you give to an organisation or commit an act of kindness (random or not), remember that charity is what reminds you of both God’s unique love and your own rebellion against it. We all need charity, on an infinite level for the infinite transgression of denying God and abusing his creation. Only when you admit that you are the kind of person who needs charity on this cosmic level will you have a hope of truly reproducing it yourself. And this will only happen once you accept Christ’s charity through his paying for your sin by his blood on the cross and as a result are brought into the fellowship of the Trinity where you can become someone who can truly give charity, for you have truly received.
As ever, three verses and a chorus are able to express all this more than my many words ever could. This is “Love of God” by Stuart Townend:
LOVE OF GOD, revealed in wonder
By the works of a maker’s hand;
Seas that roar with thunderous splendour,
Fields that whisper at His command.
All the joys of life we cherish
Are God’s gracious sign
We are children of His promise,
Heirs of mercy and grace divine.
Unfailing love from heaven’s throne,
That sought me out and brought me home.
My song of praise shall ever be:
The Father’s love for me.
Love of God, revealed in frailty,
Through the gift of a servant King;
Joy of heaven robed in humility,
Prince of Peace crowned with suffering.
Oh, what love, that calls humanity
To kneel at the cross
And exchange our sin’s futility
For the joy of a father’s love.
Love of God, what priceless treasure
Over all this world affords:
To be His and His forever,
This my glory and my reward!
May this love beyond all knowing
So capture my soul,
That I’m filled to overflowing
With a passion for Him alone!
Tags: charity, Provocative Thoughts, The Gospel, Trinity
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The Tanning Gods
Thursday, May 27th, 2010
More and more people today are recognising that the word, “atheism”, is the greatest misnomer of them all. For in ‘real’ terms, all people have an object of worship. A-theism means to be ‘without God’ but an atheist is not without a God as such; he/she has simply rejected a particular God or selection of Gods. (more…)
Tags: Beauty, Cultural Temperature, Human Interest, Provocative Thoughts
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Nick Clegg (almost) on the Gospel
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010
After watching the election debate on immigration last night, it struck me that Nick Clegg’s policy on immigration is the perfect illustration of our attitude to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Why did Clegg have to backtrack on his rhetoric of ‘amnesty’ for illegal immigrants? (more…)
Tags: amnesty, Cultural Temperature, Current Affairs, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, Politics, Provocative Thoughts, ukelection
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A song for myself
Monday, April 26th, 2010
I had never written a song before last week but I was inspired somewhat whilst reading Psalm 17. Carry on reading (and listening) to see the result: (more…)
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The Refuge (based on Psalm 11)
Friday, March 12th, 2010
Wretched whore of a thousand lies
You tell yourself and then despise
The darkness of the life you live;
You hate your soul and can’t forgive.
Tags: Poetry, psalms
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Oscar Wilde’s “alternative religion”
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
Oscar Wilde was easily one of the finest brains ever to grace the British Isles. Not only was his mastery of the English language supreme, but his clarity of thought and ability to gauge the ‘reasons behind the reasons’ was second to none.
Of course I cannot agree with Wilde’s conclusions, that no external source could be the basis for the authority of the individual, “But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating.” These words point (as put perfectly by Imogen Black) “to an existentialist crisis, a man coming to realise that he has nothing but his own perceptions for truth who has made a god of himself.” Yet at the same time, despite this relativising of truth, which the Christian worldview cannot abide, I’m not sure that Wilde’s preferred vision of religion was so far removed from the kind of religion that Christ actually produced. Today I came upon this gem:
When I think of religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. (De Profundis, letter written in 1905)
If we unpack this statement, it proves to be quite revealing. Let us examine each statement in turn and compare it to the religion imagined by Jesus
- Wilde: “I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless”
Christianity: The basic prerequisite of a Christian is not someone who has accomplished something great by believing but someone who has failed to trust in God their whole life and has only come to Jesus when they realised how ‘faithless’ they really are. In Christianity, since faith is a gift given only to those who have realised just how faithless they really are, the phrase “confraternity of the faithless” is basically – and uniquely – describing true Christianity. In fact, to call Christans ‘the faithful’ is a complete misnomer; they are not the faithful, they are the faithless who have received the faith of Christ as a free gift. There is no other religious system (and in Wilde’s mind, all frameworks are religious systems, including the secular one) that resembles Wilde’s suggestion here apart from Christianity. Modern secularism is hardly a ‘confraternity’; it is rather a selection of individuals who are united less by their system than by other factors. - Wilde: “on an altar, on which no taper burned”
Christianity: This is where it really starts to get interesting. The reason why Christianity does/should not have altars (of course this is in line with my personal unease at the presence of ‘altars’ in most Anglican/Orthodox/Catholic churches) is because the fire has already been spent. On the cross, Jesus passed through the fire of God’s judgement so that those who turn to him would not have to. The sacrifice has been offered on the altar that is the cross of Calvary. What this means is that – in stark contrast to every other religion, both secular and non, Christianity is the only religion where its followers are not in the business of the daily grind of justification. The altar and the sacrifice upon it denotes just this grind, where people are constantly engaged in the struggle to justify their existence, their actions, their place in this world. When Christ passed through that fire, he made it possible for his followers to have ‘an altar on which no taper is burned’ - Wilde:: “a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling”
Christianity: Jesus is called the great High Priest in the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament. This great High Priest, before going to the cross, states, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death”. Then, on the cross, he uttered a fateful cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” This, more than any other, was the cry of “a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling.” On the cross, Jesus suffered the utter desolation of his soul, so that peace everlasting could come into the hearts of those who trust in him. On the cross, he gave up his peace and perfect relationship with God the Father, so that it might be given to mankind as a free gift by faith. This is the religion Christ created, a religion whose great high priest became a man in whose heart peace had no dwelling. - Wilde:: “might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine”
Christianity: The only reason that a Christian believer has to celebrate is through the cursing of Christ, in his body, on the cross. Christ’s body – the bread he speaks of – was the most ‘unblessed bread’ in all of history, so that those who trust in him would be able to celebrate in the new creation with the blessed bodies that he won for them through the cursing of his own. The resurrection is confirmation that this was done in the power of God and that the power that warred against the body had been defeated. Similarly, the chalice of wine (symbolising God’s judgement) is empty because Jesus drank it all on the cross – every last drop. The Christian is able to celebrate because the wine he or she drinks speaks of life when it should speak of death. We deserved to drink this chalice, but Christ drank it instead; that is why the chalice is ‘in remembrance’ and always pointing to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross; not our own offering to God, but that which he offered in our place.
The Wildian ‘ritual of agnosticism’, born out of the general existential crisis common to all humanity, at the final analysis is simply a yearning for the kind of religion that only Jesus Christ provides.
In the end, we see that Oscar Wilde’s desired “alternative religion for the faithless” is actually describing the Christian faith. Perhaps he realised this before he died, perhaps not. The question is: do you?
Tags: Cultural Temperature, Oscar Wilde, Provocative Thoughts, Religion
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The uninventiveness of lying
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
I watched “The Invention of Lying” a few months ago and didn’t really know what to make of it at the time. Of course it goes without saying that I’m a huge fan of Ricky Gervais’ comic genius so it was inevitable that I would find the film fairly amusing and clever at times (although not as good as “Ghost Town”)… but the film also clearly had a strong agenda; what to make of its final message?
Now that I’ve had a bit of time to reflect, it seems that the only conclusion I can come to is that the premise of the film is not actually very inventive. Ironic.
So what is the premise? Gervais makes no attempt to hide the fact that the film is based on one main idea: that the stories behind religion in general and the Christian faith in particular are little more than ‘invented’ fairytales. The conclusion is that even though the reality of this world amounts to nothing more than the bare facts of science, people actually need made up stories (aka. ‘lies’) to give them hope, meaning, excitement, purpose and expectation. (Another subtext was that fat guys need this kind of world, that goes beyond the bare facts of science, or else they would have no hope of getting beautiful women – but I guess that was just part of Gervais’ brilliantly self-deprecating humour!).
In the context of the film, the ‘fairytale’ that Gervais’ character makes up which signals the advent of lying is basically a religious system concerning a place in the sky ruled by a man in the sky who can provide a hope beyond death. This is what the people buy into with the result that it creates excitement, gives him power and initially leads to a more pleasant atmosphere, although this eventually breaks down (the implication being that belief in God is not actually beneficial for society or human flourishing).
Ultimately the thing that disturbed me most about the premise of the film was not so much the thinly veiled dig at Christianity; that is not really a novelty anymore. Neither was it the fact that Gervais has typically misrepresented most of the essential facts of Christianity; ideas such as God creating the world already full of evil and suffering and Christianity as a system of works-based salvation are completely alien to the Bible yet this too was to be expected from an atheist lobby that knows only how to caricature and misrepresent Christianity…
The message that disturbed me most was rather the one which emerged out of Gervais’ own secular framework. It was the message that promoted a ‘correct’ picture of reality where there are no (ultimate) happy endings and neither is there any real and ultimate justice, as in these ‘fairy stories’. In order to comfort his dying mother, Gervais’ character invents heaven, giving her the hope of a future, a purpose for her existence and a happy ending. Even though he ‘knows’ that there is no such thing as heaven and that her death will swallow up any meaning her life ever had, he retreats to the use of made up fairytales to help her in her final hour.
There are three problems here for the secularist:
- First of all, the surgical removal of future hope and ultimate purpose leaves the secularist with only one philosophical system to provide meaning: existentialism (whether this be hedonistic or nihilistic). Such a self-limiting worldview, while not necessarily wrong, is problematic
- Secondly, this scenario, rather than undermining Christianity, only ends up lending credence to the plausibility of the Christian narrative. For whether they like it or not, secularism is a historical novelty and flies in the face of human experience. This world is a world of fairytale and myth… human culture has always been built on myth-based narratives. And, just so this word, ‘myth’ is not misunderstood here, anyone who has studied literature will tell you that fairytale and myth do not necessarily mean ‘unfactual stories’ but rather they are the depiction of certain realities that transcend what we see before our eyes, but that we can nonetheless sense. In other words, just as science has revealed to us that our eyes often deceive us as to the reality of the physical world (optical illusion, etc), so literature speaks of a similar dimension that is accessible to us on some level, yet not visible. Out of this dimension, every culture and society in human history has produced beautiful and fantastical myths and fairytales and all speak of ultimate happiness and ultimate justice – things which require an ultimate benefactor and an ultimate judge, basically a relationship with an ultimate being. Gervais may have written off this dimension completely, but he finds himself in the position of a numerical minority and a historical novelty. While we are not agreed as to who or what this ultimate being exactly is, humanity in general has always agreed that his hand at work in our world – and indeed in our very minds and hearts – is evident. Now one option is to shrug off this historical witness and just claim that all people before the Enlightenment were needy and ignorant. Despite the historical arrogance of such a position, it is an increasingly difficult one to hold as more people are realising that the only people denying any kind of reality beyond the bare facts of science are essentially fundamentalists and have thrown out decent scholarship in favour of diatribe and ‘religious’ rhetoric. Just note how many reviews of “The God Delusion” by secularists themselves have been dismissive and/or disparaging…
- Thirdly, while the secularist may claim to have heard this many times before, it by no means lessens the force of this point: such a narrative as portrayal as the ‘correct version of reality’ in the film is simply not existentially satisfying. The biggest criticism (and a fair one at that) that is levelled against Christianity is that of hypocrisy – why do people who speak of love so often fail to be unloving… Behind this question is a fundamental existential concern – why should I follow something that doesn’t work, that doesn’t provide eternal love and unconditional value and ultimate meaning in my life? So why should a similar charge not be levelled at the ‘atheist paradise’? If a world needs to be built on lies in order for it to work, then why should I take it seriously? The fact of the matter is that Gervais’ atheist paradise is based on the idea that people need to be trained to see beyond the bare facts of science – this entails lying. Isn’t this exactly what Christianity teaches? Except that in the case of the Christian message, the solution is not a lie but the truth…
The fundamentalist secular gospel – that there are no ultimate happy endings – might be coherent with the facts of science. But Gervais, in pointing us to a reality beyond the bare facts of science only ends up reinforcing the plausibility of the Christian narrative.
So how does the plausibility of the Christian narrative lead to faith in the Christian God?? And I will close with this.
C.S.Lewis put it best when he wrote that in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, “myth became fact”… All the myths and fairytales of human history could only ever have been seen as dim shadows and uncertain estimations of the nature and workings of the ultimate being who must be both benevolent and just. Yet in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the expectations of these myths were finally realised. The cross sees the ultimate dispensation of justice as well as the ultimate bestowal of love. Each person who trusts in this God is guaranteed by the resurrection of Christ that their relationship with the ‘man in the sky’ is assured. How? Because the ‘man in the sky’ became a man of flesh and died to redeem us and the world.
The film ends up being not very inventive at all, since the dreary, unimaginative world of bare facts is put forward as the real one and the world of myth, meaning and purpose as the false one.
Tags: Atheism, Cultural Temperature, Fairytales & Mythology, Films, Hollywood, Provocative Thoughts, Ricky Gervais
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Dexter. The disturbing solution to House’s problem.
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
There are many who say, “Who will show us some good?” (Psalm 4v6)
We are all familiar with the countless stories of killers getting away scott-free because there was insufficient evidence to convict them. Here is an interesting take on this theme from our favourite tv series. Consider the quote below:
House: The universe always settles the score.
Dr. Cuddy: Does it?
House: No, but it should.
The idea of justice, the righting of wrongs and balancing of misdeeds – portrayed here as karma – is present in every major worldview and belief system.
Yet it is also a concept that has failed us in spectacular fashion. House puts it best here. Justice should exist. It is ‘supposed’ to exist and work to settle the score… but this is not what we see happening.
Enter Dexter, the tv show about an amoral serial killer, Dexter, who has been trained by his foster father to channel his sociopathic serial killer urges using a special ‘code’. According to “Harry’s Code”, only people who deserve to die are killed. So if you haven’t killed anyone in a premeditative way then you are safe from Dexter’s blade.
The series has been a runaway success. And I don’t think that it is just the tongue-in-cheek humour that creates this affection for Dexter. There is something disturbingly reassuring about the existence of such a character (even in the fantasy world of the small screen).
Take the average left-of-centre agnostic/atheist for instance (basically most educated people in London/Athens under 40):
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Since they either don’t believe or struggle to believe in the existence of God, they cannot hope for a final calling in of accounts where perfect justice will one day be meted.
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If they are left of centre, they are also against the death penalty as a solution, so they can’t rely on the state.
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Taking matters into one’s own hands is not condoned and vigilantes are a unsavoury and misguided solution at best.
So Dexter is the perfect solution to the problem faced by the atheist. Dexter settles the score on behalf of the universe without obliging the viewer to condone what he is doing, as it is already established that what he is doing is wrong. Yet our delight in such a ‘neat’ solution is always a secret delight that we dare not admit. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth and still fails miserably at providing an ultimate answer as well anyway.
Even traditional religion cannot provide a solution to House’s problem. For it simply claims that one day all those nasty people will get their comeuppance. House’s words resonate with us because we too need to witness this principle of justice in action, to give us a hope that evil will not always be the status quo, that wrong will not win the day simply by its continued existence, let alone its escaping justice.
The only place this is even claimed by anyone to have happened is on the cross of Jesus Christ. A faultless man taking the place of guilty and evil men and satisfying the full demands of justice… This is what happened on the cross. Justice once and for all, for every deed. This might sound barbaric, but my hunch is that it only sounds barbaric to us because we have sanitised sin so much as to have effectively banished its ugliness from the vista of our lives. But this does not remove it… and nor it does make us any less liable to face justice for our own deeds.
For a world(view) without Christ, Dexter is not just a guilty pleasure, he is the final hope for any kind of justice. He is the disturbing solution to House’s question for those who reject God. No wonder House’s mouse is gagged – he asks all the most inconvenient questions.
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To reject the Gospel
Monday, October 19th, 2009
If you are not currently a follower of Jesus Christ there are only two possible reasons:
1) You have not heard the Gospel
(this includes those who think they have heard but what they have heard is not actually the gospel of Jesus. ie. social gospel, prosperity “health and wealth” gospel, man-centred gospel etc.)
2) You have heard the Gospel and rejected it
(this would include all who hear a faithful exposition/explanation of the gospel and yet reject it – both those who reject what they are actually hearing and those who ‘think’ they are rejecting what they are hearing but are actually rejecting something else ie. they have – willfully or not – misunderstood it.)
I would just like to address this second group for a moment. You see, if accepting or rejecting the Gospel was purely a matter or rational engagement with the Gospel then we would say that the cleverer you are, the more likely you are to grasp it and accept it. This is patently not the case, either in terms of what we see happening or what the Bible actually says about how people become Christians.
Of course, the gospel ‘does’ contain a rational set of arguments. The Christian faith is not a leap in the dark since it ‘is’ based on certain facts that are established through investigation of the evidence and following certain data to its logical conclusion. But to reduce the gospel down to this is not only misleading regarding its content, it is also misleading regarding its purpose. The aim of explaining the gospel is not to ‘test’ people’s intelligence, so that the rational people pass and those of less mental capabilities fail. The content of the gospel, while historical and factual, is particularly concerned with the divine nature of one man, Jesus of Nazareth and the work he accomplished which transcends history itself… while the purpose of the gospel, though entailing a rational appeal, is particularly to do with bringing people into a relationship with a real, living God. This means that Christianity must be engaged with concurrently on two levels – one rational and one metaphysical.
Such a separation has already been suggested in the form of NOMA (non-overlapping magesteria), posited by atheistic evolutionist, Dr Stephen Jay Gould. It is dismissed by Professor Richard Dawkins, however, who argues that certainly no supernational religion can be established without miracles violating the laws of physics. He then goes on to argue pointedly people of faith are either not rational or else schizophrenic.
This brings me us back to the issue of rejecting the gospel. If we are not satisfied with Dawkins’ explanation, that people who believe what the Bible says are either stupid or somehow separating their brain from their heart, then how are we to explain the fact that when presented with the gospel some people (both intelligent and less so) accept it and others (both intelligent and less so) reject it. Is there another parameter that we need to consider?
I believe that there is and we can see it in the words of this beautiful hymn written by Bob Kauflin (you can hear/buy the song by clicking here – iTunes link):
I was blinded by my sin
Had no ears to hear Your voice
Did not know Your love within
Had no taste for heaven’s joys
Then Your Spirit gave me life
Opened up Your Word to me
Through the gospel of Your Son
Gave me endless hope and peace
Here we see both aspects of someone’s engagement with the Gospel:
(1) We have listed for us such faculties as eyes and ears, taste and the Word – the rational aspect. These are not just metaphors here, we need to use all of these things in order to engage with the gospel and to determine its whys and wherefores
(2) We also have listed for us ideas such as spiritual blindness and deafness, distaste for the things of God and inability to comprehend spiritual truth – the metaphysical aspect.
If you are rejecting the gospel today, you need to understand that you are rejecting it on both of these levels.
In other words, you cannot rest assured in the knowledge that you have ‘really’ rejected Christianity if you have rejected it (apparently) on the basis of rationality alone. Until you have also ruled out the possibility that you are ‘wilfully’ rejecting it at the same time, you must at least curb your smugness. For the will is not just influenced by the mind but also by the affections. Therefore, it is irresponsible to be smug about having ‘worked out all the holes in Christianity’ if you are overlooking the fact that your heart just might have had more to do with it than your head. If this is the case then it could even be that you are misrepresenting the facts to yourself and wilfully misunderstanding what you are hearing (assuming that the misunderstanding doesn’t stem from a failure of the person explaining it).
One of the oft-repeated phrases of Jesus in the Gospels is the following:
“He who has ears to hear let him hear.”
What does this cryptic declaration mean? It means simply that you might be ‘hearing’ and engaging with Jesus’ words but it is possible to grasp the rationale and yet still be deaf to the true meaning. Anyone can hear the claim that Jesus died for their sins. They can even repeat it themselves as a mantra. But it is only someone who has truly heard it as for themselves who can then say it with conviction as applying to them.
Just imagine that you are in love. It is reported to you by a mutual friend that this other person requites this love. Yet you are bitter inside from past rejection and even though you repeat this fact back to others, you do not say it with conviction or any kind of excitement because you do not believe it, even though it has been reported back to you reliably by others. You do not believe it, that is, until you hear it yourself and understand that it truly is for you. This might even be after the second or third time that you hear it from the person yourself… the bottom line is that with such matters, it will never be the facts alone that lead you to believe. Your heart must be persuaded as well as your head; true truth must be impressed upon your affections… Then you will find the difference in your vision to be so stark that it were as if you had been blind before.
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