Revolting Beauty

Dr. Greg Boyd preached a sermon series in 2008 called "Revolting Beauty." This sermon series outlined this followup to his book, "The Myth of the Christian Nation."

Boyd's previous book garnered a fair amount of criticism, namely from politically conservative Christians, insisting he goes too far. Growing up under that influence, I admit I have some reservations with agreeing wholeheartedly. This latest book, however, does much to reinforce his views. Boyd isn't against conservative politics nor against America or nationalism. Rather, his thesis is that we, as Christians, ought to have our focus on Christ, not our nation, comparing America (or whatever nation one belongs to) with Caesar: "So instead of working together to do what Jesus did, we often waste time fighting each other over what Caesar should do," (p. 28). Boyd's contention is that Christians are a religious people who often act nothing like Christ. If we did, on the whole, act as Christ, many of the national issues America faces would not be important.

Consider: Christ worked with the poor. If all who professed Christianity spend time each week feeding the hungry, clothing the needy, and sheltering the homeless, these issues would seem very mute in our society, since some 70-80% of Americans claim Christianity as their religion and there are significantly less needy people about.

The chapter about nationalism was a little hard to wrap my head around, having been infused with patriotic hymns, pledging allegiance to the American flag and honoring veterans whenever in church services, it only seems natural to adhere to "God and Country." Boyd makes a point to not do these things in church. While Jesus encouraged his followers to "give to Caesar what is Caesar's," he didn't make a point to honor those soliders who had killed in the name of caesar at the temple, nor pledge allegiance to Rome or sing Roman songs of patriotism. Rather, Jesus drove out the money changers from the Temple, seeing it as a misuse of God's holy place. With this in mind, it does seem outrageous to use a church as a place waxing Americana. Particularly when Jesus died not only for Americans, but also for every nation that America has ever warred against: Native Americans, French, British, British again, Mexico, both North and South during the civil war, Spain, Germany, Germany again, Italy, Japan, North Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq again, and every smaller conflict in between and every war yet to happen. Jesus loves everybody, not just Americans. So why would he want us to go and kill "them"?

Which is not to say I am not patriotic. I enjoy America and its freedoms, and always will. There is a time and place to be patriotic. Just as prayer is not welcome in public schools, perhaps we should take America out of our churches - that's God's holy place, to be used accordingly.

Boyd continues this train of thought as all nations have always looked toward God or some gods and claimed that this divinity is on their side. Therefore they are right, all others are wrong and gives us right, if not necessity to war against other nations. This thinking has led to very un-Jesuslike wars across time. Perhaps it isn't practical for a "Christian Nation" to be peaceable, as others would take advantage, but that really isn' the Christian's concern. Ours is to be Christ to our neighbors. Let Caesar address foreign affairs.

While I enjoyed this challenging book, I had a few issues I found. Firstly, Boyd says "Jesus never..." a few times. One cannot logically prove a negative, especially with the incomplete history of Jesus' life we have available. Just because the Bible doesn't say something, doesn't mean it didn't happen. See John 21:25. I'm sure Boyd knows that, so it sounds like he's overemphasizing something, hoping we won't notice. Secondly, on page 147, he notes Jesus cursing the fig tree as the only destructive miracle Jesus performed. Again, so far as we know, but also, Jesus removed demons from a man and cast them into a nearby herd of pigs, about 2000 fold. They then jumped off a cliff. I would constitute this as destructive. Matthew 8:28-34.

Again, these are minor points. The main purpose of the book is to show the reader that being a sunday morning Christian is not enough. We are to be Christ's representative on earth 24/7. If we're not doing that, then we're missing the point.

Cataphatic Prayer, Part II

As mentioned a few posts back, the idea of cataphatic prayer, or imaginative prayer, is nothing new. Popularized by St. Ignatius of Loyola, some time back, Dr. Greg Boyd revisited this with his book "Seeing is Believing".

Part of the idea behind cataphatic prayer is to visualize in one's mind biblical events from a different point of view, or a richer perspective than what is presented by the Bible itself. Taking this idea, I've read a 600+ page 1930s copy of a childrens' Bible story book. From what I can discern, the stories presented are accurate retellings of Bible events (albeit sometimes glossed over for young ears, i.e. David's sin with Bathsheba isn't mentioned, just that David had done something rather bad...)

Taking these easier to follow accounts, one might further grasp what is going on in the story. By understanding these stories better one might place themself there and gain greater meaning from it. Sometimes this book helps clarify to the reader what is going on. For example, the people of Ephesus turned to Christ and burned their books of magic (this is where we get the idea of a Christian book-burning). The author side notes that this is profound because in the day books were expensive luxuries, not something impoverished people had. Think of it as smashing 50" 1080p plasma TVs on the sidewalk. This was really making a statement about how they were changing their lives.

Some commentary may affirm or upset theologians reading, as in Peter's vision of the blanket full of unclean animals, for which he is instructed to kill and eat.

I paricularly found interesting the commentary on Acts 5, where Annanias and his wife Sapphira sell land and give the profits to the church. However, they keep some money to themselves, but indicate the gift is the entire sum. In lying to the church, God smotes them, that is they die at once. Edgermeier's commentary expands on the Bible where it says "The whole church and all the others who heard of this were terrified" (Acts 5:11 Good News Translation). Edgermeier says that they were terrified and were afraid to claim to be Christians unless they were sure their sins were forgiven. This is poignant in terms of many who claim to be Christians who make appearances of the religiosity of the Church just as Annanias and Sapphira, but who are actually leading sinful, displeasing lives. It is one thing to "do church" and quite another to act as Jesus.

Cataphatic Prayer

Seeing Is Believing: Experience Jesus through Imaginative Prayer by Dr. Greg Boyd takes a look at Cataphatic, or imaginative prayer as advocated by many in Church Tradition, such as St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit Order.

Boyd's argument is that many Christians struggle with faith because if they are joyless or unsucessful in not sinning in particular ways, the clergy often responds with a 'try harder' response. Since a Christian ought to be joyful, if you are not joyful then you're just not exerting enough effort.

What this results in is Christians hiding struggles from one another and putting on a guise of holiness while often feeling empty inside.

Rather, we ought to seek Jesus and just be honest with Him in our struggles. The process of "Resting in Christ," as defined by Boyd is that we use our imaginations to vividly conceptualize Christ and just exist with Him, that a common understanding of how much He cares for us and wants us to be aware of that becomes evident. Only then might our Christian walk be advanced to its biblical prescriptions.

Obviously, there are objections to this process. One must not give up on 'trying' altogether, but rather an understanding that trying alone will not accomplish much of lasting value. The idea of envisioning Jesus may seem like make-believe, but Boyd argues that this has more to do with our Western science-based culture defining anything non-physical as not real.

Other issues are addressed in the book, along with several stories of people who have undergone dramatic benefits from the process.

So read it with an open mind. As CS Lewis noted in one of his books - if it's useful to you, use it, if not, don't give it a second thought.

Matt

The Shack

The important thing to remember with The Shack is that it is a work of fiction. There is no 100 pages of end notes in the back of the book like a scholarly nonfiction text. There aren't even many Biblical references within the story, which some would say, "Aha! Its clearly not a good book!" I would say lack of citations would make it a poor scholarly artifact, but that isn't what the author is trying to pass this off as. It's fiction!

Because the Shack is fiction, one would do well to build their theology elsewhere. It presents some interesting ideas and may be helpful in one's Christian walk, but at the end of the day, it is a story, and that is how this should be graded. Take the book's ideas with an open mind, but not an empty mind; that is: read the ideas presented but discern them, don't accept the book's ideas as truths just because they're in print.

All that is said to say, the book is powerful. It has a gripping emotional story arc and this draws one in. It makes for a good read, and the controversial ideas posed challenge preconceptions of what God is and how He operates. It is easy to see why these components make the story both compelling and appalling, depending on one's outlook on Christianity.

My copy of the book is plastered with positive endorsements, and it doesn't take much digging to find contrarian views of the book. It occurred to me that theologian Dr. Greg Boyd's teachings seem to be reflected in large part in this book. His positive review can be found on his blog here. Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship posted a review admonishing people to "Stay out of the Shack."

For my money, I liked the book and it's controversial ideals provided opportunity for discussion about them. Opening dialogs about Christianity is not a bad thing. I don't buy into all of the ideas posed, but do recommend it as a good read. My advice: discern for yourself if this is a good book and whether any of its precepts are worth shaping your life with.

Splinter of the Mind

I recently read the book Escaping the Matrix, written by theologian Greg Boyd and counselor Al Larson. I know what you're thinking: "A book about the recent Matrix movies! How timely!" The original Matrix film was released in 1999, its sequels in spring and fall of 2003. To be fair, the book was written in 2005 and I'm reading it 4 years after that. Still, one might have hoped the release of the book would be prior to or coinciding with the release of the film, as John Piper did with his book "The Passion of Jesus Christ", which came out a month and a half prior to the film it played off of: "The Passion of the Christ", all the way back in 2004.

So back to the question at hand: why on earth am I reading a book about a movie that came out 10 years ago? I mean, it was a good film, but aren't there more relevant books to read and things to do? Probably. But my interest here concerns the cosmological argument of the existence of God.

Okay, if you're still with me, I'll summarize that argument: Basically logicians determined that you can't get something from nothing. The chair in your kitchen wouldn't exist if someone hadn't built it, and that someone had the tree to construct it from. Now, there may have been machines and tools involved, but someone had to build them too. Something must come from something else. Scientifically, you can posture the First Law of Thermodynamics here:
"Energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but it can neither be created nor destroyed."

But the Conservation of energy isn't the question here; we're not asking if the chair used to be a tree so much as who or what caused the chair. Presumably, a human constructed the chair using wood from a tree. But where did the human come from and where did the tree come from? Science tells us that man evolved from primates who evolved from decreasingly complex organisms. Believe that or not, bear with me. The tree, likewise, (scientifically speaking) was originally a seed that grew, and the seed fell off another tree, and this goes back through time were less complex plants.

Science holds that one goes back in time long enough, and all these simple plants and organisms are wrapped up in an earth that was shot out of a cannon filled with all of the energy in the known universe, all of which contained in a space the size of a pinhead. This is the Big Bang theory. Everything was in this tiny space...everything. At some point, something initiated a massive explosion which kicked off everything we now know in the universe.

The Big Bang theory is widely accepted as the beginning of our story. But like any story based on science that takes place in the vacuum of outer space, the people want a prequel, even if they aren't good and have Jar Jar in them. So one might ask, "where did the pinhead come from" and "what caused the pinhead to explode." While some have speculated, the consensus is, we just don't know. It just was and it just did. For my inquisitive mind, this isn't good enough. Something caused that pinhead to be there, and something caused it to explode. I suspect that something was more than the vinegar getting to close to the baking soda in that pinhead.

The other side of the coin, the Creationist view, would hold that God created everything. This leads to the same questions though. Before the heavens and the earth came into being, and God was just there, where did God come about from? Using the same human logic, something must have evoked God into being, right? No, my religious friends are just as obstinate about this as my scientific ones. They say, no, God just is. His scale of time does not coincide with ours, that He also was and is, and is to come. He is the beginning and the end. What? This is just as unhelpful in my question as saying the pinhead just one day deciding to explode into the known universe. The question being, if God started all this....where did He come from? Is there some uber-god that created Him into being, and if so, that's the guy I want to be looking for. But then the question is, where did that uber-god come from? The same logic would hold that he had his roots with somebody else. Maybe the forerunners of God have died off or are on vacation in some tropical region of the multiverse, leaving God in charge. Don't miscontrue my questioning for irreverence; Jesus implored his disciples to have the faith of a child, but anyone who has spent time with a small child knows that they like to ask 'why'. This is me believing, but also asking why.

Detractors of the cosmological argument assert that the argument stops at God. Everything has an explanation for being except when we reach God's level, then He just is. This would seem to be an exception from which the whole logical argument is based on; I would attest that the argument makes sense if we continue the logic. Where did God come from? "You will never know" they tell me, "God is an incorporeal entity for which the laws of space and time are irrelevant and inapplicable." Perhaps we cannot be able to understand this. I can't help but think that there must be some inkling of comprehensible explanation that we could derive about God's purposeful existence.

This leads me back to one of the precepts of the Matrix. Throughout the movies the idea of existing in a sort of Russian Nested Doll structure, where one goes inside of a slightly larger one, which goes inside of an even larger doll. Just as electrons spin around a nucleous to form an atom from which humans are comprised, perhaps we humans are but tiny electrons "spinning" around the nucleous of the earth's core. From there you could equate the earth itself being one of the planetary "electrons" orbiting the nucleous of the sun, making our star system one of many 'atoms' that make up a much larger galactic something. That galactic structure might well be spinning around some focal point in the universe, and our universe may be orbiting some point of reference in the multi-verse, if you are inclined to step out so far.

So I picked up the book "Escaping the Matrix" hoping that it would touch on this concept of the Russian dolls as it pertains to we the people, as this might illuminate some of the concerns I have with the formation of an almighty God. This book has nothing to do with that.

Escaping the Matrix is however, good on its own merits. The concept here is that in the mind we have structured a matrix of how we perceive memories, good, bad and otherwise. The Bible indicates that Christ imbues us to renew our minds, and break out of conformity to the nature of the earth. The authors posit that in a fallen world with powers and principalities abounding, we are given to misinterpretation through these matrix structures of our minds. This is where phobias and other psychological issues derive from as it pertains to minimal but poignant past memories. We construct them in our minds as being a certain way and this hinders our lives. As we control our minds, we have the power to reshape our memories; re-construct them slightly differently such that they are not as detrimental to us. The example is given of a woman with a phobia of insects. By reshaping the memory which instigated this phobia she was able to overcome it. How does one reshape a memory? By changing it, the way a director would put a yellow color filter on the lens, or use camera 2 for this scene, putting different music in the memory, things like that. There are lots of interactive exercises in the book, and these suggestions are very plausible.

Think for a moment about a happy time, but focus on it, noting all the senses - sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound, and what emotions you might have. Focus on each one of these senses briefly. Now continue focusing on that same memory, but change the senses. Change the camera angle of the memory...instead of looking through your eyes, you're in 3rd person, or the other way around. If you hear something, change it; put happy music into a bad memory, and the bad memory doesn't seem as terrible; things like that. Its an interesting concept, based on biblical teachings which, the authors indicate has been able to produce results in the people they have helped through this technique.

So Escaping the Matrix was good, but not quite what I was hoping for. I mean, it was really really good, and I'd recommend reading it. The church Greg Boyd pastors, Woodland Hills church hosted a seminar back in 2005 surrounding this idea and they have audio files from that event on their website here. I haven't listened to these, but I'm sure they are similarly profound as the book was. But, it looks like I'll have to keep searching for my answers.

Matt

Who is Jesus?

Greetings again friends. Today I'm writing about the last booklet I have in Grandpa's collection of literature from the Worldwide Church of God.

"Who Was Jesus" is a concise work by Paul Kroll, whom I know nothing about. The text is remarkably similar to explanations and arguments I've heard on the feasibility of the deity of Jesus of Nazareth, who lived and died about 2000 years ago.

Briefly, here are the main points:

1) There was a man named Jesus who lived in Nazareth in what is now part of the nation of Israel. Assassin's Creed players will find that this is North of Jerusalem, East of Acre, and South West of Damascus. This fact is attested to by not only the gospel accounts found in the Bible, but also by several ancient historians.

2). Jesus claimed to be God in human form. This makes him one of 3 things:

1. A Liar
2. Crazy
3. Actually God in human form

3). Jesus was put to death for claiming to be God. Let's look at what this means in terms of the last 3 options. If he was lying, why continue to the point of death? Surely he understood these guys were serious. I mean, what did he gain by dying for a lie? Moreover, in death his movement would have ended, particularly as the Bible - from a historical context - provides that his followers abandoned him as he was being executed, at least one denying ever knowing him.

4) The story of Jesus of Nazareth continues 3 days after his death. According the Bible he rose from the grave and appeared to his followers again. For the sake of argument, let's contend you don't allow the bible as actual historical fact on this matter and he either 1) stayed dead or 2) was never really dead. I'd contend that as a dissident condemned to death, the Romans would not have half-executed him. Historically, the Romans were quite good at putting people to death. This leaves the option that he stayed dead.

5) So if he stayed dead, what's the big deal? His followers had abandoned him at his execution. Why are there still Christians today? Early Christian leaders posited that if Jesus had not risen from the dead, this is all pointless: he was either a liar or crazy in claiming to be God, but was never to be seen or heard from again. No, these early Christians felt so strongly that Jesus had come back to life (as he had predicted he would) that they resumed following him at great cost - many of them lost their lives as well for this reason - but felt that our 3rd option, that Jesus actually was God to be most reasonable, and the movement that started with followers scared of losing their lives for knowing Jesus has expanded into one of the largest world religions, many losing their lives willingly for this cause.

Okay, so much for being brief. Some of this is from arguments I've collected over the years, not exclusively from this booklet, but the booklet does a good job of surmising the basic reasons why Christianity developed from its roots. I also recommend Dr. Greg Boyd's "Letters from a Skeptic," which is more erudite but goes deeper on similar points of why there is evil in the world and why then Jesus Christ is God in human flesh.

Until next time,
Matt

Review of "Letters From a Skeptic"

Greetings Friends,
At Andy's behest, this entry is about theology. I've finished reading the book "Letters From a Skeptic," which is a collection of correspondence between Dr. Gregory A. Boyd and his skeptical father, Ed.

The book starts with Dr. Boyd imploring his father to expound on the problems he has with Christianity and inquiring of him why he is an atheist. The father, Ed, responds that his lack of faith is not an affirmative position, but rather one based on his inability to reconcile the principles of Christianity with life.

Throughout the book, Dr. Boyd provides explanations to his father's concerns, and slowly throughout the course of the letters, in three years' time, Ed transforms from an avowed atheist to a Christian adherent. The book is described as being put together that it might have a similar impact on other skeptics.

I give this book a favorable review. The questions asked are very elemental concerns that both Christians and unbelievers may have. No doubt there are those who would disagree with Dr. Boyd's answers to all his questions, but he sums up Christianity very concisely: God wants to have a relationship with people. He does this by sending Christ Jesus to pay for our sinful nature. This gift of atonement is readily available to all who would ask for and receive it, whereupon we are given not just life, but that we might live more abundantly. One doesn't have to be perfect to receive the gift, in fact that's why we need a savior in the first place, because we aren't perfect. Only by God's grace may we enter into our Father's loving arms.

Until next time,
Matt

Theological Q&A

I found this podcast on the Woodland Hills Church website. It is an open theology question and answer session ranging from all over the place. Pretty interesting, a little lengthy, but good. Mostly I wanted to post this ridiculous picture. Discussants are Dr. Paul Eddy and Dr. Gregory Boyd, both of whom pastor at WHC.

Download the mp3 files here: http://www.whchurch.org/content/page_904.htm

Until Next time,
Matt