I apologize to any readers outside of this area, but the following blog entry deals with the politics of Escambia County, and to a lesser extent to Florida politics in a more general way. I know that others do have similar problems in their counties and states, so you might be interested in this just a bit, but the focus is local.
My step-son James was a student at Tate High School in Escambia County, Florida before he passed away in September 2004. (His Deeds Keep Following Him). One of his greatest sources of pride and joy was his participation in the Tate Band. This was what took up his time and energy day in and day out. He had planned to try to go to college on a band scholarship. His motivation for everything else he did at school came through the passion he had for the band.
My wife, Jody, and I have continued to keep in touch with the Tate Marching Band (Showband of the South) and to support them as we can. We still get the newsletter, and the current edition reminds us that Escambia County Superintendent of Schools Jim Paul has proposed that the school day be cut from seven periods to six. I was already aware of this, and was considering writing something about it, but the band newsletter article motivated me to get the job done sooner. It is programs like band and sports, sometimes called extra-curricular activities, that will be most hit by the reduction in the school day.
But academics will be hit by this move as well in two ways:
Directly through eliminating programs and classes, especially electives
Indirectly through removing some of the balance in students’ lives and some of their motivations
The reason for this proposal is simple, and I have to sympathize with Superintendent Paul as he tries to solve the problems with which he has been presented. Escambia County teachers are much more poorly paid than those in neighboring counties (Unlikely group queries 6-period plan). If he is to improve teacher pay, the money will have to come from somewhere else. Right now, that “somewhere else” appears to be school buildings and the extra hour in the school day.
In the past, Escambia County voters have been very reluctant to approve taxes as additional support to our schools. Our primary funding comes from the sales tax, and is distributed by the state according to some mildly complext formulas. (You can get more information on how this works from Education News You Can Use (School Funding Data), provided by the Florida School Board Association.
Some facts you might want to notice there include these:
Florida ranks 29th in teacher salaries. We should note that Escambia County is not one of the highest paid counties in the state.
Florida ranks 49th in citizen spending on education.
Florida ranks 43rd in student : teacher ratio
So we are not spending an extraordinarily large amount of money on education in the state of Florida, in fact, we seem to be going backward. I recommend reviewing the following page from the National Education Association site, Good News about Public Schools in Florida. Look at the source studies as well to see where they got this information. There are obviously some good things going on, but there are also problems.
I’d rate declining spending on education as a problem. I stated my own views on the problem in a prior essay, Make Education a Priority. I know that the trend today amongst voters and politicians is to cut taxes and to cut spending, but I’m going to swim against the current on this particular point. There are things that can be cut and should be cut. The simple solution, and in my view the cowardly solution, is to cut spending and taxes across the board.
Let me illustrate. During our son James’s illness, we had to watch our spending. Since my wife and I were self-employed we had to make a decision as to some things that would be cut, and some things that wouldn’t. We quickly agreed that those things that were part of the process of generating income should not be cut. It didn’t take lengthy thought or discussion, because it’s too obvious. We needed to continue to generate income.
In government spending, the equivalent decision is the one between infrastructure spending and other items. If you cut on infrastructure spending you will pay for it over the long term. Notice in the items on the NEA page cited above that many of Florida’s school buildings are deteriorating. That’s an obvious issue of infrastructure spending. But I would argue that education as a whole is a matter of infrastructure spending. If we educate and motivate our kids we are contributing to the future economic power of our county and our state. We will be reducing the number of inmates for our prisons, and recipients for our welfare rolls. Both of these will make our economic condition better. Unfortunately we seem to prefer to put a bandaid on the cut, rather than avoiding the knife. We’re more willing to put people in jail than to prevent them from getting there in the first place.
Yes, I do believe education is a silver bullet. This means well-balanced education that motivates kids, instills community values in them, and prepares them for a productive life. Will simply making education available suffice? Absolutely not! We need to uphold high standards of discipline, academic accomplishment, and community involvement. I’m glad to see that Florida schools are cited for high standards. I hope we make them higher.
So what do we do?
Write to your school board members, school superintendents, and also your representatives in the state legislature. When you write, let them know specifically what you want to accomplish, and let them know you understand the cost and are willing to stand up and help with paying the bill as well. We can write the school superintendent as often as we want, and fill his files (or his wastebasket) with letters telling him how we want schools to stay open or the school day to be seven rather than six hours, but if he doesn’t somehow get the money, we may simply be urging him to accomplish the impossible.
My wife and I are going to write these officials–the school board member from our district, the superintendent, our representative and senator in Tallahassee, and our governor urging them to support education. We will tell them we aren’t interested in words. Practically every politician out there claims that education is a priority. But as I have told church leaders who are wringing their hands about the failure of church projects, you can tell the real priorities by looking at the spending and the personal presence of the people involved.
Politicians will try to claim they can provide the highest quality education without any additional taxes. They do that because that is the popular thing. The politician who tells you the truth–quality costs money–gets in trouble. You should ask them precisely from where the money is going to come and how they are going to make it work. And don’t be misled by those who believe simply putting money into the schools will solve the problem. We need adequate resources with accountability.
As citizens we need to be involved, and we need to be involved for the long term. We not only need to work for and vote for the candidate who promises to do more when running for office, we also need to be there to work for the finances and to defend the politician who has the courage to admit that the finances are necessary. We also need to be there for the politician who has the courage to increase accountability.
For those of you in Escambia County, use the following web site to find your school board member and contact information:
Note: I wrote this for my wife’s devotional list for today’s (12/30/05) entry. Jody puts out an e-mail devotional every weekday, and has also created a collection for her book, Daily Devotions of Ordinary People – Extraordinary God. I’ve included an ad (Amazon.com) for the book and a link to subscribe to the e-mail list. We probably only cross over between my blog and her list a half dozen times each year because they have a different flavor and purpose.
5What is mankind that you remember them?
Or human beings that you pay attention to them? 6But you made them a little lower than God,
And crowned them with glory and honor. 7You made them rule over the works of your hands.
You put everything under their feet. — Psalm 8:5-7 (TFBV)
4Now when the time was fully right, God sent his son, made of a woman, made under the law, 5So he could ransom those who were under the law so they could be adopted as children. 6Now because you are children, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts with the cry, “Abba, Father!” 7So that you are no longer a slave, but a child, and if you are a child, you are also an heir through God. — Galatians 4:4-7 (TFBV)
Its coming up on New Years Day, and many of us will be making some resolutions. Some of those will mean a change in our lives. Others will be forgotten within days, or perhaps even within hours. I think the practice of making resolutions is, on balance, a good one. Times of commemoration and renewal are good for us, though it might be better if we had them more often, and were more careful to remember them between.
But the question I want to suggest to you in this last devotional before New Years is this: What kind of resolution is appropriate to a child of the king?
While youre thinking about that, consider something else. Tonight, my wife and I were watching Criminal Minds
I’m back to thinking about inspiration today. Many people think about the terms “inspired” and “canonical” as nearly synonymous. Generally they are not.
The term “canon” relates to idea of canon law, in other words a book is canonical when canon laws defines it as authoritative. Now the edges have become blurred over the years, and we have many different churches, but in general you will still find a statement in any church’s statement of beliefs that designates certain books of the Bible as canonical. For protestant churches, this is almost always the 66 books that have been accepted as canonical since the protestant reformation. The Roman Catholic Church, various eastern Orthodox churches and some smaller bodies have a different list of books.
The books listed as canonical are generally assumed to be inspired, and thus to carry divine authority. But the act of making certain books canonical does not necessarily make them the only books that are inspired by God. Other works may be inspired. A person may regard other works as authoritative.
This brings up the concept of a “personal canon.” In one sense, that is a contradiction in terms, since “canon” by nature involves a community to which the standard applies, and not an individual. But as used, it simply means those books that a particular individual regards as authoritative in some way. Alternatively, some people use that term to designate the list of those books they regard as inspired. I prefer not to use that second sense, because it reinforces the notion that “canonical” and “inspired” are synonyms.
So how does an organization establish a canon? That would depend on the organization. In the case of early Christianity I would suggest that it was in many ways a contest of popularity, with the proviso that I’m referring to popularity in use as an authority on doctrine or practice. By the time the church councils got together to make authoritative lists, there was really very little wiggle room. By virtue of the earlier victory of what we now call “orthodox” doctrine, and the fact that generally orthodox bishops and officials attended the councils, we get a canon that was acceptable to orthodox churches.
I don’t have a problem with the procedure. In effect, I think that popularity must be a primary consideration. It would be hard to force a community to accept material that they truly did not like as authoritative. But this does relate directly to the idea of inspiration. Very frequently a community later accepts as authoritative someone who was not popular in his own time. Jeremiah is an excellent example. He was persecuted when he spoke, his work was cut up when he wrote, and he ended up forcibly taken to Egypt against his will. But his book later became an authoritative part of scripture.
This leads me to point out almost a contradiction between immediate inspiration and immediate relevance of a message and its acceptance as canonical. Some of the most inspired and challenging statements that have ever been made have been given to communities that really didn’t like them at all. I suspect that in most times the message of a true prophet will not be well received. A message may receive very mixed reception. Gandhi was poorly received by the British occupiers and by those who wanted to turn to violence. Others received his work joyfully. Inherent in the way he inspired people to action was the fact that he angered other people.
My point is that simply asking whether a work is canonical or not is not a very good way to determine its value to your own spiritual life. Most of the material we now have in the Bible and which are regarded by all Christian churches as authoritative, was once poorly received by at least a part of the community. The things that truly correct us and call us to greater action are likely to be frowned upon by those who need them most.
What a defined canon does for us is tell us what defines our community. It does not define the boundaries of what helps us grow spiritually.
I’ve been doing some discussion of the prophecies of the book of Daniel recently on the Compuserve Christian Fellowship Forum. The discussion there is about the Seventh-day Adventist doctrine of the investigative judgment and the time prophecy of Daniel 8:14. But that is not what this post is about.
As I reviewed the many related prophecies about the time of the end, I couldn’t help but see the strong emphasis on one source of hope–the writers of Daniel and Revelation held up for themselves and their readers the hope that God was going to intervene and that everything was going to turn out all right. This kind of thinking is often described with the term “eschatological” which simply means that it has to do with the end of all things. In particular, eschatological thinking, speaking, and writing in theology refers to the notion that things will not end naturally as they run down due to the normal course of nature, but that there will come a point when things appear utterly hopeless, but at that point God will intervene and things will change.
For many Christians today, guided by the book and movie series Left Behind, this type of eschatological view is pretty much the only view. It is so pervasive that few understand that there are any alternatives. Now my topic is not these alternatives, but in order to understand what I’m about to say, you will probably need to realize that there are such alternatives. Many Christians believe that the kingdom of God will grow in the world and that the end comes by the victory of God in the world by means of the people of God. Even though this does deal with what might be called “end times” it is not generally thought of as eschatological thinking, because evil disappears slowly, forced out by the good, rather than suddenly at the other end of a major battle.
Often these kinds of thinking are contrasted. One either holds that the good of the kingdom is to be accomplished now, by us doing our duty in the world, loving our neighbors, and being witnesses. The kingdom of God, in this case, functions like seed, and grows like a plant, slowly displacing the wrong. On the other hand, eschatological thinking is supposed to take us away from the things of this world to a place where we spend our time thinking entirely of heavenly things, and looking for the count of souls that we have won, so that when God does intervene, the largest possible number will get taken to heaven.
Scholars in the search for the historical Jesus tend to see Jesus as either eschatological, based on Mark 13/Matthew 24/Luke 21, or they may see him as a wisdom teacher based on the many parables of the kingdom. If the kingdom grows like yeast (Matthew 13:33), then it’s sort of the non-eschatological view; if it comes violently, the eschatological.
And there is, of course, a substantial difference between the two views. One has the world getting very bad, and then being rescued. The other has the world slowly getting better.
But there are two similarities that I have noticed right away between the two views:
Hope Both views emphasize hope, even certainty of a good final conclusion.
Endurance Both views call for current good, kingdom building behavior, though for different reasons.
What does this mean to individual Christians? It means simply that no matter what view we take of the end, whether we are premillenial, postmillenial, or amillenial, or whatever prefixes we add to the word “tribulation,” we all have the same requirements on us now. Those requirements are stated in the two great commandments to love God and love our neighbor, and in the gospel commission to be a witness.
I think that the problem frequently is in what we believe “witness” means. The eschatological view often seems to make people think that their form of witness must be to vigorously force people onto the list of those headed for heaven. The non-eschatological view tends to emphasize how we change people’s behavior here and now. But the Biblical view, even in the eschatological books, is that our primary witness is in our living a kingdom type of life here and now. Read Daniel 1 and 6, for example, to see the type of action that this definitely eschatological book is calling for.
The bottom line here is that as Christians we have hope. However it is accomplished, good is going to win. And no matter whether we believe God will intervene in a spectactular manner, or if we believe the kingdom wins by slowly growing and displacing people, our task as Christians is the same–be the body of Christ for the world.
There are quite a substantial number of theories about how God inspires people to write his message. Several people have suggested recently that I collect some of my own essays in order to provide a coherent discussion, not just about the results of inspiration, but also the process. I don’t think I’ve written enough about that. (For those who are interested in my prior material, Inspiration, Biblical Authority, and Inerrancy, and my shorted, more edited items, The Authority of the Bible, and What is the Word of God?)
Before I go on, though, I must note that this essay is about looking at inspiration after you believe that a particular work, in this case the Bible, is inspired. There is nothing obvious about this conclusion, and I intend to write some more about why one might regard a particular work as inspired.
Typically, Christians have found proof texts in scriptures that make comments about inspiration. “All scripture is inspired (or God-breathed) . . .” (2 Timothy 3:16). “No prophecy of the scripture came by human will . . .” (2 Peter 1:21). These texts are not only used to prove the inspiration of scriptures, ignoring the circularity of using a Bible verse to prove that the Bible is inspired, but they also provide the foundation for an understanding of how inspiration worked. (Again, I’ll go into that issue in another post. Right now I’m working at a point after one has jumped into the circle and concluded that the Bible is inpired in some way.) I most commonly hear 2 Timothy 3:16 quoted in this connection. I ask someone what inspiration means. “All scripture is God-breathed,” comes back the answer. “God-breathed” is supposed to be obvious, but somehow the passage doesn’t enlighten us as to what God breathes and how. Another answer, that prophets speak as they are carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21), doesn’t really answer the question either.
The process of inspiration is important not only in terms of how we understand God to behave in connection with people, but also in telling us what we would expect to result. For example, those who believes that God dictates the precise words that a prophet or other inspired writer puts on paper must in turn believe that those words, and not just the message they express, are important, and that they must always be the best words for the purpose. On the other hand, someone who believes that people receive impressions from God and then express them in human words will place a greater emphasis on the human side of the equation. The message is important, and it may be illuminated by knowing the person who speaks along with his or her cultural background and spiritual experience.
As the author of Hebrews expressed it:
1In old times God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets in many portions and in different ways. 2In these last days, however, he has spoken to us through a Son, one whom he has made heir of everything, and through whom also he created the universe. 3This Son is the brightness of his glory and the exact representation of his real essence. He sustains everything by his powerful word. He performed a cleansing from sins and sat down at the right hand of majesty in the {spiritual/heavenly} heights.
— Hebrews 1:1-3
God’s message came at different times and in different ways, a process that the author of Hebrews states culminated in God’s message coming through a person, Jesus. In Hebrews 4:12 he continues by calling the Word “alive and active” again referring to the Word of God as portrayed in Jesus. Those who place a heavy emphasis on the words, rather than the message, should give serious consideration to the view of revelation expressed in the book of Hebrews. According to this one scriptural author, whom most scholars leave unidentified, inspiration doesn’t always work the same way.
I would suggest that instead of looking for statements about how inspiration works in the scriptures, we should look at the scriptures themselves. There is no good reason to assume that those who experienced inspiration would also feel it necessary to define it. In fact, when we look at the scriptures we see no real effort to provide us with a theory of inspiration. There were simply people who claimed that they had a message from God, and they expressed it with some force under their various circumstances.
It doesn’t seem that in many cases we have words dictated by God. Other than Moses bringing the tablets of the law from Mt. Sinai, we don’t seem to have material actually written by God. Moses himself has various scribes chronicle the activities of the Israelites as they travel through the wilderness (Genesis 17:14, for example). This would appear contradictory to the notion that Moses himself wrote the Pentateuch, or that it was delivered as a whole by God to Moses. What need of scribes to record the details if God had provided the words already?
Elsewhere in scripture we have communication given through dreams, visions, direct prophetic oracles, and research. The books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles make reference to previously existing sources. Luke, in his gospel, makes a point of the research that he provided. John the revelator seems to have concocted a special form of Greek, unless one assumes he simply made an exceptional number of grammar errors, in writing the book of Revelation. I would suggest it is because he is so excited in the emotional state that results from receiving the vision, and that he struggles with words as he tries to describe what he has experienced. This seems far from verbal dictation.
We have prayers and stories that seem to express ungodly views (Psalm 137:8-9 and Judges 4-5, for example). We have variations in similar stories that can be observed by comparing Samuel-Kings and Chronicles, or the four gospels in many cases. Clearly there is something more than verbal dictation going on here. In fact, there seem to be quite a number of “somethings” going on.
If you accept the Bible as your sacred book, you will likely also have to come to the conclusion that God has spoken in times past in very many different portions and in very many different ways.
(In my next few posts I will be connecting this idea with the incarnation as I discussed it in my pre-Christmas posts, the basic issue of what literature is inspired, and the idea of a Biblical canon. Who decides what is authoritative and in what way?)
Typically we talk about salvation around Good Friday and easter. We are saved by his death and his return to life. And there is certainly something to be said for that. But this constant focus on the sacrifice of Jesus being largely in his death sometimes obscures other meanings that the Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection have for us. I’ve recently seen some folks argue that the death wasn’t a sacrifice, because he came back to life, while Christians responded, “But it was a sacrifice! It was! It was!”
But the sacrifice of Jesus was not solely in his death. It was in his birth, his life, his death, and finally in his resurrection. In my book, Not Ashamed of the Gospel before the chapter titled “I Am Not Ashamed” (p. 17), I include this quote, in my own translation:
Though he was in the divine form,
He did cling to his equality with God,
But he emptied himself,
Taking the form of a slave,
Becoming human in form,
And being found in human pattern,
He became obedient to death,
Even death on a cross,
So God has exalted him,
And given him a name above all names,
So that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow
Heavenly, earthly and beneath the earth,
And every tongue should confess
That Jesus Christ is Lord
To the glory of the Father
The senator is quite right that the case provided a bad set of facts for the desired result. In fact, the facts of the case practically guaranteed that the school board, as defendants, would lose.
But why did Senator Santorum wait until after the case was decided to say anything? Unless he was exceptionally careful to remain ignorant of the case, he had to know what was going on. The more the trial moved forward, the more clear it was that the defendants did not have a chance.
The point in this case was not a desire that students be taught scientific controversies. In fact, thus far there is no scientific controversy about intelligent design. I am not enough of a scientist to predict what is likely to happen, but I suspect that this is not one of those revolutionary new theories that will rapidly gain acceptance. Rather, I think it is likely to fade away as even those few scientists who now support it realize that it is a free floating theory, lacking any facts that it needs to explain.
Controversies in science are an excellent topic for science classes, because one can deal with the definitions of such words as “fact,” “hypothesis,” and “theory” and teach our young people how to examine evidence carefully and come to valid, reproducible conclusions. Unfilled holes in the theory of evolution are a fertile area for such study, but that is not because the theory is weak; it’s because the theory is strong, and that it’s value extends across many fields. That simply means that many fruitful areas for research will be suggested as the details of the history of life, mechanisms for variation and selection, and genetics are studied more and more.
Intelligent design, on the other side doesn’t (at least as yet) provide such opportunities. It simply slams the door on research by passing certain processes off to the supernatural. Now I don’t have any problem with things that are, at least presumably, supernatural being handed over to theologians and spiritual leaders. But the mechanisms that intelligent design assigns to the activity of an undefined designer have not been adequately studied. In many cases natural solutions are just around the corner or even now being described.
Intelligent design also doesn’t answer the theological questions. Finding that God had to tinker in order to produce certain systems hardly qualifies as a type of proof of the existence of our creator God. God is manifested everywhere, in every natural law and natural process. The very processes that allow evolution to take place are, in fact, the result of the power of God. When we study those processes we have a chance to look at God in action.
More Christians need to take a stand that intelligent design is not doing credit to our religion. The stated purpose of the Thomas More Law Center is a reasonably good one–defending the religious freedom of Christians. (I would prefer that they said “the religious freedom of all Americans, but I guess I can’t have everything.) But when they took on this lousy case they engaged in lousy law and lousy politics in the support of lousy religion.
I’ve been kind of beating around the bush about the doctrine of the incarnation and what it means as a challenge to Christians. So let’s get down to business.
The roots of my view here are in the two commands of Jesus–love for God and love for one’s neighbor (Matthew 22:34-40). These commands are defined by the way in which God acts towards us (1 John 4:10-11). God carries out the intent of the two commands from his perspective as we are to do from ours. That’s God’s end of the incarnation–God love, God sent, God saved.
But there’s another element: God challenged. While this idea is rooted in the teachings of Jesus, I think it is best summarized in the words of Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:16-21. I’m going to summarize even more. “God was in Christ” is the incarnation. Through the incarnation God crossed the gap from the infinite to the finite in the incarnation. That act reconciled God and humanity, that is, it brought us together. Then God gave us the work and the principle (word) of reconciliation. That’s the challenge.
When Jesus said, “Love one another just as I have loved you,” (John 15:12) he passes on that challenge to us.
Now for many Christians, possessing the “correct” doctrine of the incarnation is part of what makes us special. It’s what gives us–people who believe in Jesus–the exclusive hold on salvation. And I do, indeed, believe that it was the incarnation that made salvation possible; even better, it showed that it was possible by showing that God could and would indeed cross the boundary between the finite and the infinite, and would do so both ways. It showed that God would become kin to finite and imperfect human beings (Hebrews 2:10).
But does that really make us “special” as compared to all other people? I think what it does is make us challenged. We are challenged to love in the way that God loved. That means that we need to become gap-jumpers. To love as God does, we need to recognize that there is no gap that cannot be crossed, and that we are called to cross those gaps. Jesus was a reconciler and God has called on the followers of Jesus to be reconcilers–gap jumpers.
It’s unlikely that anyone has failed to notice that I have spent no time thus far in trying to demonstrate that the doctrine of the incarnation is true. I’ve just been playing with its meaning.
In fact, I generally don’t find it appropriate to try to prove a mystery in the first place. Let’s just face the fact that a person who is 100% divine and 100% human doesn’t really make any sense to us as such. Personally, I think that if it does make sense to you, you have a problem. In one sense, the mystery is a metaphor to help us understand the divine presence in the life of Jesus. (If that sentence doesn’t either twist your brains or give you some problems, then perhaps you should read it again. Go ahead! Have problems with it!)
For me, the key to deciding whether a metaphor, mysterious or not, is valuable is in the fruit. Does it help us improve in keeping the two greatest commands (love God and love our neighbors) or not? And in my view the incarnation does help us fulfilled. In the incarnation, God crossed the greatest gap that there could be between any two entities. God is infinite, we are finite. No matter how much you subtract from infinity, infinity is not diminished. God has bridged an infinite gap in coming to dwell with us.
The theological term “kenosis” or “emptying” describes what was happening in the Christmas story. Read Philippians 2:5-11. Jesus gave up everything, becoming a human and accepting human conditions. That means that he had to live as we do. Often we think of Jesus having many special powers and full knowledge of how his life would go, but for him to live like us, to be tested as we are (Hebrews 4:14-16), he needed to work largely with powers that we have. At the same time we call him fully divine. Now that’s a mystery!
Interestingly we celebrate this emptying at the winter solstice, in one sense the low point of the year. We make it a joyful celebration, but at the other end of the two-ended cord, it’s an emptying, an end.
Christians often complain of the association of Christian holidays with pagan ones, and Christmas is a good example. It’s pretty unlikely that Jesus was actually born on December 25, but the celebration certainly fits the event. There’s no dishonor in sharing a theme with paganism. Not all pagan ideas are bad. There’s no reason to believe that every myth from another religious is filled with falsehood. (See http://www.religioustolerance.org/winter_solstice.htm for some information on other winter solstice celebrations.)
Myths, metaphors, and celebrations can be great, and they can help us grow.
