Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • The Spiritual Importance of Separation of Church and State

    When I’m challenged on historical facts about the separation of church and state, I usually simply tell people that if separation of church and state was not part of our constitutional law (and I believe it is), I would still support it.  At least as strong as my political reasons for supporting the separation are spiritual reasons.

    Ed Brayton has been commenting on Berkley, Michigan where the decision has been made to turn a nativity display over to the city’s churches.  Ed notes:

    And it seems to me that the Christians there should be happy with this as well. Keeping the creche on city property required adding in a bunch of secular symbols as well, watering down the religious significance of the display. I can’t imagine why they would prefer to do that and keep it on city property rather than have it on church property where they have no such restrictions.

    I think it’s very bad for religion to acquire the power of the state for itself.  There is an immediate tendency in two directions.  First, we become lazy, expecting the state to do things for us.  Second, we start to compromise in order to keep everyone on board as we must in order to keep that official support.  The town of Berkley, MI may not have its nativity display on public property, a dubious blessing at best, but it will now have a Christian display.

    But it’s the first point I want to emphasize.  We are instructed in the gospel commission to make disciples.  Disciples don’t happen because somebody makes a law.  They don’t happen because of monuments to the 10 commandments.  They happen because one Christian is an effective witness to another person and then helps that person become a disciple.

    We have the means and the instructions for reducing the rate of abortions, divorces, drug addiction, murder, and other crimes.  It’s reaching out and making disciples, one person at a time.  The money is there in the churches, though often it is spent more to maintain structures than to carry out the gospel commission.  There are people in the churches who could do this, though many, if not most of them are sitting in the pews once a week.

    Christianity, or better being a follower of Christ, should be a voluntary effort, funded by the efforts of followers of Christ, and uncompromising because it is carried out by those same followers.  When we get government funding involved in religion I do believe there is a danger to the state.  There is a danger of people enforcing their religion on others.  There is plenty of evidence of this.

    But there is also the danger to spirituality, when the things that should be our passion–living Christlike lives characterized by the two laws–become simply a matter of custom and law.

    Christians should be concerned about preventing evil deeds.  But they should be more concerned about transforming the people who might commit those deeds.

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  • Making Miracles Possible

    Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars in which Ed Brayton responds to some of the scientific claims, I found this post.

    Now I’m not particularly interested in the specific scientific claim, and whether it makes the virgin birth more “possible” somehow.  What interests me here is the tendency to try to find natural explanations for miracle claims.  DaveScot says:

    I have a problem with these people in that they arbitrarily limit what science can potentially explain. The so called supernatural remains supernatural only as long as there’s no metric by which to measure it. Once a metric is discovered the supernatural becomes the natural.

    Paul quotes someone on the virgin birth of Christ saying that it defies everything
    science has revealed in regard to mammalian reproduction. This is utter dreck.

    My response, however, is disbelief.  First, explaining that some part of the reproductive process might be compatible with the human reproductive process seems to me to accomplish precisely nothing.  Is it DaveScot’s intention to claim that the virgin birth is a purely natural event?  But second how is it that he expects to come up with a metric to measure the supernatural?

    Bluntly, this illustrates even more why much of what is claimed for intelligent design (ID) is simply horrifying theology.  First, the virgin birth in which I express belief each Sunday in the apostle’s creed is not a natural event.  I don’t care how easy or hard it might be made to appear, it’s not natural.  The key point of having it in the creed in the first place is that it is an ultimate example of God stepping into history.  It’s different from those natural occurences, such as gravity or my own birth that occur due to natural law, or what I would better express as the consistent will of God.

    What DaveScot appears to be proposing here is that one eliminate the supernatural through learning to measure and presumably explain it.  But that goes quite contrary to the primary intelligent design claim of either irreducible complexity or specified complexity, which requires something other than a natural process to explain.  Now I must ask which ID theorists want.  Do they want to stop looking for a natural explanation, or would they prefer to explain everything naturally.  If the latter, in what way are they not more anti-God than their opponents.  (Personally I don’t think DaveScot’s claims here would hold general acceptance amongst ID proponents, but I could be wrong.)

    On my second point, however, I affirm God the creator in the same creed with the virgin birth, by which I do not mean a God of either disappears or becomes natural as we find a way to measure him.

    I have always had little sympathy for the tendency to try to explain miracles.  Either one believes God can intervene or one doesn’t.  If one does believe God can intervene, no natural explanation is necessary.  There could, of course, be alleged miracles which are merely fortuitous natural events.  But that is not the claim of believers.  The claim of believers is that God did, in fact, intervene in the case of the miracle.  For the virgin birth, the bigger claim than the physical event is that Jesus the human being was/became God incarnate and lived on earth as a human being.  No amount of explanation of the human birth processes can explain that.

    My personal belief is that while God created a universe that will successfully run without intervention, God does interven to communicate.  But I need no physical explanations of the possibility of such intervention.  If I had such, that would simply become another natural part of the universe.

    Again, I believe I’m confronted with the mysteriously shrinking god of ID.  It just doesn’t make it theologically.

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  • Christian Carnival CXLIX

    Christian Carnival CXLIX has been posted at Touring with Virgil. As always, there are some interesting posts, this time including one of mine from Threads rather than from the Participatory Bible Study blog. Again I have good intentions about commenting on a few posts, but I rarely get beyond one or two a week.

  • Lingamish on “Seed-Pickers”

    Lingamish has a post on a preaching peeve of his–seed pickers. You’ll have to go to his post to see all the details, but he defines a seed-picker as:

    A seed-picker is a preacher who grabs verses from all over the Bible and slaps them together in a puking pastiche of public preaching. A seed-picking sermon is marked by wide jumps in topic and involves so much thumbing through the Bible that even the most ardent Berean finally loses heart and has to just take the preacher’s word for it when he says Ezekiel 44 says such and such and Revelation 12 says so and so.

    We’ve all heard such sermons, I’m sure, though in many Methodist sermons these days the scriptures are more likely to be few and far between. Nonetheless, Lingamish makes a good point, to which I’d like to add a couple of comments.

    The key isn’t how many scriptures you use, it’s how appropriate they are and how well chosen. As Lingamish notes, many people like to remind us that “. . . they all [Bible books] ultimately have the same Author (notice the big A).” At the same time, it is worthwhile for us to remember that the Bible is presented to us the way it is, in many portions and at various times (Hebrews 1:1), precisely because that uppercase ‘A’ Author chose to provide it to us in that fashion. When we randomly connect pieces from one scripture with another, we deny the very providence of God which provided the Bible to us as it is.

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  • Conceptual Idolatry

    Paul tells us that we now “see dimly in a mrror” (1 Corinthians 13:12), but some of us are quite certain that we see clearly. While I believe we should make every effort to get closer to the truth, it’s important that we understand that God’s ways are not our ways, and thus we will never get precisely to a “God’s eye view” of any problem or issue. In a recent comment Oloryn noted that:

    . . . in reading scripture, we are in the position of listing to One who does not share our outlook. If we haven’t learned to do that with people, are we going to be able to do that with God?

    Now he was responding to some comments I made about listening to God in scripture, and those were some good points, but in making that point he has also noted that God does not share our outlook. And that’s an important point to remember.

    This post was triggered by a post by Joe Carter over on Evangelical Outpost. In that post he accuses Bart Campolo (son of Tony) of idolatry:

    Still, it is rather shocking to hear someone be unabashedly open about their idolatry as Bart Campolo, son of Tony Campolo, is in a recent article for The Journal of Student Ministries*:

    [Carter continues by quoting Campolo]

    Now my intention is not to respond in detail to Joe Carter on this. It’s simply that his post came at a time when I was thinking about this sort of thing and struck me as just plain wrong. There are some points on which I disagree with Campolo as well, though my primary intention is not to defend him either.

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  • Exceptionally Good Testimony on Women in Ministry

    Scot McKnight has posted the testimony of Stan Gundry and his journey from complementarianism to egalitarianism and some of the thinking that marked it. I think this is one of the best pieces of writing on the topic I have read.

    I note that he also faced the challenge of the difference between the testimony of the story of scripture–the things women actually did–and the interpretation given to certain passages.

    It’s great stuff, not only for the issue of women in ministry, but also as an example of a scriptural approach to understanding an issue.

  • More on Evolution Conflict

    Ed Brayton has again weighed in on the framing of the conflict over science education. I agree with the way in which Ed has laid out the issues, and strongly recommend reading his piece.

    As an advocate of sound science education, I would like to repeat some things I’ve said before, but that are often forgotten in discussion.

    I am not opposed to free speech for intelligent design advocates. In fact, I see them exercising free speech all the time. What I would suggest they do about the peer reviewed publication is to simply establish one or more publications with peer review and publish scientific research in those publications. If it is done well, scientists will begin to read and respond to the new evidence they present. Of course I think the reason they are not generally published in peer-reviewed journals is because they are not doing research that is worthy of such publication.

    Further, I have no problem with ID being discussed at the college or university level to whatever extent the people who are teaching there want to discuss it. I went to college at a place where young earth creationism was a regular topic. Nobody is actually being repressed here, no matter how loud the whining becomes.

    But more important than my perception of repression or its absence–after all, I could be totally wrong–is the simple fact that there are other avenues open. In this age of the internet and various easy print publication opportunities, it’s quite easy to get something into print. But the real complaint is not getting published or not, it’s where one is published, or how much respect one gets from scienfic colleagues.

    That respect from scientific colleagues, however, has to be earned. And earning it is hard work. New ideas do work their way into the scientific community only slowly, and most new ideas get thrown out in the process of discussion. That is appropriate. One can argue that there should be more room or less room for new ideas, but ultimately, science must test ideas thoroughly before they are accepted.

    And that leads me to the place where I do not think that ID has a place–the high school science classroom. Why? Very simply I believe that the high school curriculum is packed enough with consensus science, and that it should be limited to that. Let new ideas be discussed elsewhere and when a scientific consensus arises, that will be time enough to add that material to the high school science curriculum.

    Framing the debate a s religion vs science, however, makes this difficult, no matter which side frames the discussion in that fashion.

    (Note: Read Ed’s piece before you comment here. I’m only making a small subpoint.)

  • I Thought this Before it Started

    Henry Kissinger now says that the Iraq war is not winnable, something I thought from the start. talking to the BBS (via MSNBC), he said:

    “If you mean by ‘military victory’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible.”

    All those factors were there before the war got started. If you combine the fact that Iraq is a nation pieced together from disparate elements that don’t really want to be a country in the first place with neighbors who would be happy to be in control of the same terrirtory you are placing a tall order. Then consider the fact that there never was a united opposition to Saddam’s reign, simply because the various elements of the opposition don’t generally share a vision for the country.

    If we allowed democracy to take it’s course, Iraq would likely become an Islamic republic led by the Shi’ites. Unfortunately what we seem to want to produce is a government that is both democratically elected and does what we want it to do. Bluntly, it’s not going to happen.

    Before the usual culprits accuse me of being pacifist and not wanting to fight terrorism, that is not my point. I believe that military force should sometimes be used. The problem is that there are those who don’t seem to choose wisely between one use of force and another. There might even have been things that could be accomplished militarily in Iraq. But the Iraq war that actually occurred was, in my view, a strategic error. My concern is not that people were killed, or that some feelings were hurt. My concern is that people were killed without any good and lasting result.

    At this point I’m afraid I see no option but to simply declare a set of doable goals–a certain amount of time spent in training, specified equipment levels for the Iraqi forces, and similar things, and then get out. Goals such as a peaceful, secure state are simply not going to happen, and all we’re doing trying to accomplish such goals is wasting time, political capital, money, and most importantly lives.

  • A Consistent and Principled Approach

    In a poll taken before the last election respondents indicated strong disapproval of congress (31% approve/63% disapprove) as a whole, and yet by an almost equal margin (60%/33%), they indicated approval of their own congressman (Fox Poll 10/13/06). This type of result occurs repeatedly in polls. I’m just using those numbers as an example. Similarly polls (and general observation) shows that people disapprove of attorneys as a profession, but like their own attorney, or certainly want a good, hard-hitting attorney on their side if they are in trouble.

    It’s very likely that these differences in perception have something to do with who each of those people are working for. My congressman has to try to serve my district, for example by trying to keep military bases here, get federal road projects here, and so forth. There are 434 other congressmen who don’t share his priorities on those district based items, and thus it is very unlikely that the people in any single district will approve of the whole of congress as much as they approve of their own.

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  • Identifying Moderate Muslims

    Laura has a short post over at Pursuing Holiness on Pakistan and a move toward moderation legislatively. The particular form of moderation involved is preventing women who are raped from being charged with adultery. Personally, I’m eagerly awaiting the announcement of a moderate stoning, so that I could get some idea what that would be like (no, not actuallly!).

    MSNBC has an article on this titled Pakistan lawmakers OK changes to rape law, and it’s subtitle, Death penalty for extramarital sex dropped; Islamic fundamentalists angry is also of interest.

    I think our response to this sort of thing, including both the original problem, the reform, and the response of some other Muslims can be problematic.

    1. We might become hostile to Islam as such. This is an unacceptable option to me, simply because I know from personal experience that there are Muslims who are good people, who make good neighbors, and who would abhor the mistreatment of women (a severe understatement for charging a rape victim with adultery) as much as I do.
    2. We can put our heads in the sand because we don’t want to seem intolerant, so we don’t want to these Muslims, lest we seem to be intolerant of all Muslims. This, in my view, would morally reprehensible. We must, I believe, combat evil, and this is undoubtedly evil.
    3. We can do our best to identify specific people and policies and oppose those. This is what I try, not always successfully, to do.

    This is one of the problems with our “friends” in the Middle East. In many cases it’s a “with friends like these” situation. In order to fight one form of evil, we get tangled with another. When I was in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in that part of the world during the first gulf war, I really thought about this. Who was it that I was defending? In general, my response had to be that they were not people I would want to defend, if I had the choice. This is not about them being Muslims. It’s about them being tyrants and enforcing sadistic laws and policies.

    I’m going to continue to try to distinguish Islam itself from many of its adherents. But I’m not going to let that stop me from making it clear that certain policies are simply evil. The treatment of women in many countries of the Middle East is one of those policies.