Worshipping Vesta: Goddess of the HearthUndated - early 1993
Have we begun to worship the nuclear family? Christian marriage? Human roles (husband, wife, father, mother)? Have we forgotten that the only mention of the family across Jesus' lips is that He will turn father against mother; son against father; brother against brother? Have we forgotten that our much esteemed tradition of Christian wedding cannot even be found in our Bibles? Have we forgotten that those disciples who turned the world upside down didn't come from Christian homes? Perhaps we would do well to re-analyze our emphasis on the family and on our roles as spouse and parent. Perhaps we should return to the true calling of Jesus - to preach the gospel to all nations.
Acts 3:4-8,11-12 - "And Peter, along with John, fixed his gaze upon him and said, "Look at us!" And he began to give them his attention, expecting to receive something from them. But Peter said, "I do not possess silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you: In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene - walk!" And seizing him by the right hand, he raised him up; and immediately his feet and his ankles were strengthened. And with a leap, he stood upright and began to walk; and he entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God;...And while he was clinging to Peter and John, all the people ran together to them at the so-called portico of Solomon, full of amazement. But when Peter saw this, he replied to the people, "Men of Israel, why do you marvel at this, or why do you gaze at us, as if by our own power or piety we had made him walk?""
Legend has it that Thomas Aquinas and a friend walked through the streets of Rome beneath the beautiful spires of cathedrals and churches and the friend looked up proudly and said, "Truly, we Christians may no longer say "Silver and gold have we none" as Peter and John did. Aquinas, with his head downward replied, "But neither can we say "Arise and walk!"
The Plague How often do we succumb to the doubts, fears and prejudices that we harbor? Do you find yourself tempted to cross the street to the other side in order to avoid that person? And couldn't it be true that what Jesus was really trying to teach us with His prophecy of snake bites and poison is that we really don't have to be afraid to reach out to those that we are conditioned to despise or fear? Is it not the call of Jesus to leave behind the comfortable, the easy, the attractive and the admirable - and to reach out to the uncomfortable, the hopeless, the ugly and the rejected? Not because these are virtuous qualities - but specifically because they are not virtuous qualities - because it is these people who no others save those living out the love of Jesus will reach out to. During one of Stanley Shipp's classes on missions preparations, he took a group of his students to Calcutta in India - and introduced them to Mother Teresa. She shared with them two valuable pieces of advice. In response to a question about why she, in her seventies at the time, continued to live in such filth and poverty: "I live in poverty because you can never truly know that Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have"When asked what the most important lesson to learn in being a missionary, she responded by taking the hand of a young lady in the group and holding the hand high with the five fingers extended upward - touching one finger at a time as she spoke the following words of Jesus: "Unto the least of these..."
Certainly, we are not all to live in such poverty - for the lost exist in every walk of life - from the beggar to the executive. All are in need of God's love - all are precious in His sight - regardless of their status in this life. But there is something of monumental importance that takes place when we allow God to reach out through us to those who, were we without God, we would never approach on our own.
After reading Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, I've decided that his comments relating to the natural world and the chaos theorems is decidedly a locus classicus for post-Enlightenment deification of human reason. In his comments on chaos theory (through the mouth of his mathematician character, Ian Malcolm), Crichton proposes that in the natural world, science, at best, can only guess about the behavior of systems. Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle places knowledge at the subatomic level beyond final understanding. As does Godel's mathematical theorem for the world of mathematics. After shaking off medieval superstition in the 17-19th centuries though Aristotelian logic and Lockean inductivism (as well as Baconian empiricism), man was certain that he held the power within his head to solve all problems. Thus arose over the next 400 years the greatest ego to ever grace the face of our planet - man the Messiah. Girded up by new technology and the seeming advances in society man lunged headlong into the business of solving humankind's greatest problems. Crichton points out, however, that after all this progress, it still takes a housewife the same amount of time to clean a house as it did before the advent of dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines - as well as pointing out that the average caveman spent twenty hours a week in order to provide food and shelter for his family while the average male spends over 40 hours a week to do the same today. So have we truly advanced? Man lives longer (about 53% longer) but works over twice as much - and deals with new problems in those extended years - illnesses that were basically unknown to man before the life-expectancy was pushed to its present longevity. Crichton characterizes the business of science as one of ego and ambition and that the so-called "pursuit of truth" that scientists give as the reason for their work is really quite pathetic. Researchers have always, Crichton suggests, sought discovery without considering the consequences of such discovery - saying that such considerations are intellectually insignificant when compared to the "pursuit of truth". He notes that scientists argue that someone will discover these things anyway - so their job becomes to find it first and get the credit. He says that unlike most other pursuits, science and technology do not have built in control systems for those who wield them. For instance, a person who spends his life devoted to the study of marshal arts, develops as he goes certain qualities - wisdom, discipline, restraint, self-control, etc. These traits that have developed over time in his pursuit of his goal are the exact mechanisms that prevent the abuse of his final acquisition of the skills he sought. Therefore, you do not see marshal arts experts killing in anger - they are attained wisdom. Instead, you see children purchasing Saturday night specials and shooting one another - the acquisition required no time for reflection, no dedication to the goal, no self-discipline, no acquisition of wisdom and knowledge of how to use such power. Crichton says that the same is true of science and technology. We "stand on the shoulders of giants" - using the knowledge they gained through years of reflection and discipline - without, ourselves, submitting to such a growth process as they underwent to reach their discoveries. Thus, we are infants with guns - unable to control wisely the knowledge we have inherited. He also mocks the great concern over the welfare of our planet (cf., Rush Limbaugh's The Way Things Ought To Be). The Earth, he argues, has been around for billions of years. She has undergone constant, violent, destructive upheaval. What, he asks, is humankind going to do to hurt the planet? If a species dies out, isn't this just the evolutionary process at work? His point being that, for instance, should we deplete our ozone layer (which is radically unlikely considering that a single volcano's eruption releases more greenhouse gases than all of the manmade gases throughout history - and these have been erupting for millennia but we still have ozone!), and ultraviolet radiation increases, who suffers? Ultraviolet radiation is a source of powerful energy for living systems. Certainly things would mutate to adapt to the new environment - and some species - man perhaps - may not be able to adapt and would die out, but, overall, the Earth would continue peacefully along. So, really, man can do nothing to destroy or save the planet. We may only destroy or save ourselves. The philosophical implications of Crichton's arguments are powerful. Man's belief in his ability to eventually control nature, manipulate it, and use it is in vain. These are intrinsically chaotic systems - inherently unstable. They behave in completely unpredictable ways. We may build models that give us some insight into the near-term behavior, but the outcomes are now and will forever remain beyond our grasp. Weather prediction is the example Crichton used most frequently. We may, with some small degree of accuracy predict the behavior of weather patterns for a day or two, but beyond this, the unpredictable, irrational, random behavior of natural systems removes accurate predictions beyond our grasp. Take a pool ball for instance. On a table with other balls, it would seem like Newtonian physics would quickly provide answers to the ball's behavior when struck. And, indeed, for the first second or so, we may with accuracy predict the ball's path, its collisions, its momentum transfers, etc. But beyond that window, thousands of variables are introduced that make accurate predictions impossible - the incongruities in the ball's surface, the roughness of the felt on the table, etc. Asimov was a great proponent of this belief all mysteries would eventually be unraveled by humankind's ever-widening power of reason. Yet this humanistic, ego-centric view of man is to remain forever the fanciful vision of Utopianists. Beyond technology, we see other arenas where this worship of man has blinded us (cf., my lecture on The Secular Church). Modern man with his impressive array of technological "advances", inwardly feels that he must look back on the past with pity. "Those poor fools," he says, "how little they really knew about life." And with a wink and a nod, we disregard the lessons of the past as outdated, uninformed superstitions. But on what grounds do we despise the moral wisdom of our ancestors? Does their lack to technological sophistication make worthless their morality? If anything, this should be the one area that we choose to learn from history because, while we may inherit their technology and improve upon it, no amount of technological progress has provided the least bit of moral advancement. How less true are Plato's musings? Aristotle's thoughts? Christ's sermons? You see, in the area of philosophy and spiritualism, humans have not progressed. Morality has not changed from the time man hunted wild beasts for his sustenance to the time we genetically engineer cattle to yield the most meat. And what is most frightening is that given the technology we have, we are for the first time completely ignoring the morality of the past. We have decided that we shall make a new morality based on human rationality and Utopian vision. But we are still the same humans! Our reason has brought us no closer to moral perfection and our technology has made the path there more difficult to trod. In the face of all our great technological advances, our crime rate soars, our children kill one another, we abuse ourselves with drugs, we fight in wars where children are starved or raped or slaughtered. With all the power of human reason bent on improving our world, we slip ever closer to the brink of despair.
What is at the center of this devolution of spiritual man? Our deification of rational man. Even our Jefferson once pointed to the moral concerns of the evangelicals of his day and said that they would vanish in a decade. Fortunately, Jefferson was wrong. There are still those who believe that mankind is helpless in the face of this world. That while we may seek to improve our lot in life, it is, in the end, a vain pursuit - a narcissistic quest for self-actualization. There remain those who know that we are not gods. That man is the god who has failed. Nietschze, Russell, Skinner, Freud, Marx and Camus all were wrong. Faith in man is misplaced faith. We cannot deal with our own inventions. We cannot deal with our own vices. We may be on a path to destroy ourselves, as environmentalists tell us. But their answer, with the benefit of some historic insight, rings hollow. The answer to our survival lies outside the realm of human reason. It lies outside the realm of scientific exploration. As one astrophysicist wrote, "Scientists have climbed the mount of universal understanding and found the theologians waiting for them."
Before a man can seek God, God must have first sought the man. "No man can come to me," Jesus said, "except the Father which hath sent me draw him." We must have positive reciprocation on our part. "As the deer panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the Living God; when shall I come and appear before God?" Psalm 42:1-2.
"Scientists have lost God among the wonders of the world; Christians are in danger of losing God among the wonders of the Word." The first step in discipleship is the desire for God. C.S. Lewis explains that the "joy" we experience in this life is really a calling to something else through the joy. A beautiful sunset, a line of poetry, a verse of song, the touch of a loved one, a happy childhood memory - the feelings that these stir within us are what Lewis calls "joy"; and it is these feelings that we humans misinterpret as what we actually want. When, upon closer analysis, we realize that these feelings do not satisfy. Rather, they intensify our longing for something more. Or, more accurately, something other. It is this other that men spend lifetimes seeking and cannot find - while children often find it easily. The something "other" is, of course, God Himself. And the desire for God is man's greatest passion. It is the saddest irony, however, that we too often in sincere dejection proclaim to God that He made our desires too strong for us to handle. God, however, knows that the opposite is too often the case. We toy with things such as illicit sex, drink, greed, power and vanity - seeking to fill our desires for this other. But when we succeed at such endeavors, we find that we are not satisfied. It is as if the thing we previously desired suddenly means nothing. Yet thousands of generations of humankind go to their graves never wondering why they were unable to satiate their desires. The problem, of course, is that our desires are not too strong. They are too weak. As Lewis put it, "We are far too easily pleased." We settle for the momentary pleasures and the feelings of "joy" and determine within ourselves that this must simply be as good as it gets. While still the Other calls us to true completion of desire. All desires we experience are simply some manifestation of our desire for God. It seems that God has created within every human heart a God-shaped hole. In our desperate attempts at filling this void, we stuff into our hearts things of every conception and nature. Always falling short of filling the void. Always leaving us somewhat empty. And there continues to throb within us the ache of the eternal.
And what is acutely important to our understanding of discipleship and of our God, is that while all the pleasures of earth will not fill our God-shaped hole - should we attempt to leave one terrestrial pleasure lodged in our hearts, there will not be room enough for Him.
The Revelation is more a poem than a text. It doesn't reveal to us things that we do not already know from the previous writings in the canon. Rather, it reveals these things to us in a way that we have not previously conceived. A poem does not seek to educate, it seeks to make. It does not seek to inform us, it seeks to involve us. When we have completed the work of poetry, we have not increased our education as much as we have increased our experience. St. John seeks these same goals in the Revelation. We are presented with imagery so fantastical that many today find it either too daunting to undertake or too vulgar to study. Yet, he presents in the poet language the Christ that directs our lives. Through poetry, John shows us thinigs about Christ and God and the Church and the World and Satan that we have not previously understood. When read with a sincere heart, John transports us to another time and another place. We are placed in the divine milieu between God and Satan. We are invited into the inner halls of heaven and shown its wonders. Our modern-day, atrophied imaginations are stretched sometimes beyond comfort with the boldness of John's images. John's images at the outset of the Revelation depict to us a Christ that we have not seen in the pages of the Gospels. The humble, itinerant preacher is gone and present in his place is the awesome white-haired, emblazoned-eyed God of Revelation. We are called to revisit the OT imagery of the Son of Man discussed in Daniel. The comparison with the statue of Nebuchadnezzar's dream is direct. The head and shoulders of the dream-statue are gold and bronze - impressive looking. Yet, the feet are iron and clay. A mixture that is not only unaesthetic, but is unstable and apt to be undone easily. John's image has feet of bronze - a mixture of both iron and copper - iron providing strength and copper providing beauty and protection from rust and decay. Christ is displayed at the preeminant, all-powerful being that we have heard about throughout the New Testament, yet presented here in a way that captures the imagination.
It seems that many in recent years among the Christian fold have undertaken the goal of wedding modern scientific thought to Christian theology. Yet the two are really (or should be) mute in regards to one another. One is the method of analyzing our natural world through the discovery of apparent facts; the other is a cosmology/epistemology making not only truth statements but inductive models through which to interpret facts. The theory of evolution is not science. It is an inductive model based on an epistemological set through which facts discovered in the natural world may be interpreted. It is not fact. It is not empirical. It is theory. And as such, on its own merits, must stand or fall based on the presently available evidence. It does, for many, offer a rational explanation of the majority of data available to biological and geological parties. However, many problems exist with the theory (missing transitional fossil evidence at the most critical junctures, for instance) that must be overlooked based on the statistical insignificance of their occurence. What this translates to is that the theory doesn't explain everything. Rather, it offers an explanation of most of the data while seemingly in conflict with some other data. This is not unusual in scientific theory. Some anomolies usually exist that seem to disagree with the reigning theory. Alone, these anomolies do not preclude a theory from being workable. In fact, it usually indicates that further research must be done to discover the cause of the anomolies and when discovered, they usually fit into the theory nicely. On its own, then, evolutionary biology has merit as a scientific theory. First, we must define what evolutionary biology is and what it seeks to do. It is a logical positivist model for interpreting biological data to explain the biological diversification and development of species of living organisms on earth. Evolutionary biology seeks simply to explain the facts of special diversification and development. It is strictly an explanation of the mechanism of development. It attempts to explain the development of species - it does not, cannot and should not be used to explain the origins of life or the purpose of existence as some popularizers often attempt to use it. Evolutionary biology offers no explanation (no scientific explanation, anyway) for how life began on earth. Some biologists will, however, postulate how it began - in a warm pool of organic soup (abiogenesis), perhaps - but this is not evolutionary biology, this is opinion. So, in and of itself, evolutionary biology attempts to explain how life (however it appeared) mutated and developed on earth to produce the present array of species. That is all it attempts to do. Those using it for other purposes are either driven by a non-scientific agenda or are not good scientists. Next, we must identify how this particular theory is used in modern thought and how it conflicts with Christian faith. Modernists - mostly logical positivists in the intellectual community - seek to find explanations for things strictly according to natural patterns and rational interpretations of the facts. Hence, when evolution appeared on the scene in the late 1800's, it offered a rational explanation of known facts that was completely in line with observed natural patterns. No calls to the supernatural were necessary to explain the differences observed in the myriad of species of life on earth. As such, it offered the biological principles for an atheistic epistemology. Note, however, that atheists existed long before the theory of evolution. Evoluation simply provided a more systematic inductive model through which to interpret known facts in nature. From this foundational principle, theories of abiogenesis, expanding/contracting universes, etc., were later developed to complete a systematic, areligious cosmology. Evolution, by itself, is simply a part of this cosmology. However, the epistemology defined in evolution has been adopted in every field of modern hard science (astrophysics, geology, biology, zoology, etc.) and most soft science (psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc.). As such, disproving the epistemology found in evolution would provide a way of unravelling the entire perceptual set used in modern scientific thought. For the sake of discussion, I will use the term evolutionary thought to refer to the epistemology used in evolutionary biology with the understanding that evolutionary biology on its own is simply a theory in one arena of science.
What, if any, is the conflict in this model with Christian thought? First, even within the Christian community there is no clear stance on evolutionary biology. However, most Christians - and indeed most Americans - still believe the God created the earth and that individual species were created ex nihilo by God and that since that time, microevolution within special sets has occurred based on environmental conditions and habitats. Additionally, some believe the dating of biblical geneologies in the Old Testament to date the earth at around 6000 years old as opposed to the age provided by recent (within the past 150 years) geological theories. Others have, in contrast, interpreted the first chapters of Genesis to be allegorical or metaphorical thus stripping them of any fact claims about the mechanism of development of species of life on earth. In this view, God could have used evolutionary biology to develop life on earth. It is true that God did not write a science text. He explained creation through Moses and the Pentateuch in terms that the people of that day could understand. I believe that God created the heaven and the earth. I believe that God created man. I am not sure how he did it. I believe the Bible is inerrant and complete. I do not believe that it is meant to explain the natural world around us. Therefore, I believe it is possible to say that within the biblical framework, the creation description could be metaphorical - that God could have used a biological mechanism to create life on earth. I believe this is possible - but by faith this is not what I believe.
Francis Schaeffer (FS) begins with the dissection of the paradigm shift in philosophy from antithetical thought as expressed in orthodox Judaism and Christianity to dialectical reasoning as expressed in the work of Hegel and his triadic movement. FS points out that beginning with Hegel, the following with Kierkegaard, faith and reason were gradually segregated in the mind of modern man into, as Schaeffer puts it, the upper story (faith) and the lower story (reason/rationalism). In this separation, it was determined that belief in God, theism, absolute value, the worth of man, etc., must require a "leap of faith" (Kierkegaard). And one cannot arrive at the upper story conclusions - the purpose of man, being in the universe, absolute values, etc - from the bottom story. FS goes on to show how this existentialist thought quickly - in comparison with previous epistemologies - deseminated through philosophy, art, music, drama and the general culture. This separation of faith and reason is the basis for modern man's worldview. At first, it would seem that with the shift towards post-modern thought in the latter part of the twentieth century, that FS's predictions are falling short. However, upon closer inspection of the new interest in spirituality, we find exactly what FS has said is still intact. With the advent of existentialist thought with Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus and others, Western man rushed to the bottom story - for scientific empiricism and logical positivism. In recent years, the shift has been towards the upper story - the leap of faith requiring no logic to one's belief - and no demand that one's belief be universally applied. Thus we have New Age monism as a leap of faith whose adherents express their tolerance of other's viewpoints and religions because they have no claim to propositional truth themselves - only their vindication by the act of will in their leap of faith. FS goes on to point out, however, that this separation is wrong; that the bottom story does indeed lead one to the upper story. He states that any theory seeking to explain phenomena must adhere to two propositions regardless of the type of proof at hand - religious, philosophical, scientific: 1) it must be non-contradictory and it must consistently explain the phenomena; 2) one must be able to consistently apply the theory in one's experience. FS argues from here that any worldview must meet these two criteria in order to be acceptable. He further argues that the Christian epistemology is the only one that does. From this he concludes that every non-Christian is in a state of tension - tension between the logical conclusions of their epistemology and their real-world experience that denies their epistemology. He states that many never analyze their presuppositions and the conclusions that should be drawn from them if one is to be consistent, so unearthing their tension will require time and concern on the part of Christians. Having read Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton, I have some additional thoughts as to how FS's thought ties into GKC's thoughts on sanity/insanity. GKC and CSL both spend a fair amount of time (in Orthodoxy and The Abolition of Man) dealing with that part of man beyond reason. CSL calls it the "Tao". The innate sense of virtue and morality that humans in every culture and time have had some sense of. GKC discusses this from the perspective of the imagination (as CSL does in other places) and how in our most basic nature - in our very imaginings - we yearn for the acceptance and the "well done" from that Other Beyond Our Knowing. CSL does a supreme job of arguing the existence of the supernatural from the validity of human reason - and the logical conclusion one must reach about reason if determinism is true. GKC discusses at length the end of those who cling only to reason and discard all else (the bottom story men of FS's thought). GKC states that these people who cling only to reason and discard all else - if they consistenly apply their thought - must reach a point of insanity. We see this kind of despair in much of the world to date. But FS points out that most people - though clinging to an existentialist epistemology - do not consistenly apply it. Rather, they ignore the inherent conflicts in their thinking and their experience. They, like all men, experience their "mannishness" as FS puts it. They experience the Tao. They experience their own imaginations. And all of these experiences lead them to conflict with their worldview. This is the tension. FS is quick to point out that reason is certainly not everything - it is a necessary part upon which all else is built. GKC is quick to point out the opposite, since he is arguing from the opposite end - that while we must never abandon the non-reason, reason is that upon which non-reason is founded. So, arguing from two different perspectives, they reach the same conclusion. That the upper story must be founded upon the lower.
FS also spends some time discussing how words and symbols are used in the modern thought to capture feelings instead of content. He states that as an alternative to Jung's collective consciousness as derived from evolution, our words carry connotations from generation to generation. Using the word "God", for example, will bring with it certain connotations that modern man will use to stir feelings in his listeners without really meaning what "God" has meant. Thus, he will capture an audience's attention and make a argument that seems persuasive to them because of the symbols he uses as opposed to the content of what he has said. Much of modern spirituality uses this in the extreme. But even the lower story adherents use symbols liberally to sell their rhetoric and make it pallatable and comfortable to the masses. A prime example is the pap spewed by Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov. Both men of great intelligence with a gift of writing and rhetoric that allows them to paint comforting, beautiful pictures of things that are neither comforting nor beautiful. And they do this with symbology. "The Cosmos is all there is and all there ever was..." The atheistic propositions are made to sound noble, honorable, moral - when their worldview does not allow any of these things to exist. Yet, through the use of word symbols, they capture the feeling of the "mannishness of man" without the necessary content and conclusion of its existence. So symbology, as opposed to content, is all important to the modern thought.
When I read the prayers of Scripture I see two things - both very foreign to me. I notice Job's anger in his prayers. I hear the glee and joy of David's voice as he dances his prayers before God. I hear the whispered desperation of Elijah. I hear the exhaustion of Jesus on the cross, "My God my God, why have you forsaken me?"; "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." What I hear first in the prayers of my brothers and sisters in Scripture that I often do not hear in my own - is a nearness to God. But even more than the nearness is the feeling of being at home - in a place where the conversation is not only honest, but natural. Prayer wasn't a command to be kept or a task quickly checked off the list at the end of the day. Prayer was the breath of their soul. It was the unyielded, honest, harsh and raw conversation of a child with its Father. There was no false pride or reverence. Only a child pouring out its heart to its Father with unapologetic honesty. So many times I place limits on my prayers with God. I limit them by my time. I limit them by my posture. I limit them by praying only "religious" things in "religious" ways. But we pray because prayer changes us - not simply to try to change things. We pray because in prayer we are in intimate conversation with God. The prayers of Scripture are not sugar-coated, sanitized mouthings of pietists. They are often angry and desperate and radical. They are prayed in fevered breaths panted by a fugitive running for his life. Screamed in pain of death or in joy of victory. The prayers of Scripture seem foreign to me because, too much so, I am foreign to the Father. Prayer to those in Scripture who knew God best was conversation with God. It was a talking to God. And the second thing I see woven throughout the fabric of Scripture prayers is a longing, a yearning, a desire for more of something. Prayer is the slight cracking of the door between this world and the next - between this shadowland and that Otherland. It is not that prayer introduces us to full fellowship with Him as much as it lets us glimpse what is to come - and in the glimpsing to make us all the more impatient for its fruition. The prayers of Scripture are often uttered against a backdrop of impatience. Impatience with waiting for the fellowship to be complete and this darkened veil to be not only pierced but rent from top to bottom and cast away. "How long, O Lord?" the Psalmist cries out. How long, indeed. When we pray, we are entering the Holy of Holies - not as uninvited interlopers; not even as guests. We are being ushered in as children - not with heads bowed, but with confidence and joy and celebration. When we come to our Father in prayer, we are coming home. We are entering our household. And God waits for us at the door. |