Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

So last time I was talking about Jesus as the Life and the Resurrection and how I thought that death really got under the Savior's skin. Here are a few more musings about the topic...

As I was talking about these ideas with a colleague of mine we got to talking about the idea of death and Satan. It was here that I had something of a revelation. You see, I had always thought that the great battle was between God and Satan: the Lord of Light vs. the Prince of Darkness. But as I thought about it and as we discussed it, I’m beginning to think that this just isn’t true; God’s great battle isn’t against Satan, it’s against death. Satan doesn’t really war against God, instead the devil wars against humankind. It wasn’t God the Adversary tried to trick in the Garden, it was Adam and Eve. When God shows up, it’s pretty clear that He has power and authority over the Adversary. In fact, anytime we actually see Satan he’s in the lesser position trying to afflict man with something (think Job).

God’s war is against death. The problem is that we humans chose death in the Garden. God said, don’t eat that and we did anyways. My colleague likened it to me telling a houseguest that they can eat or drink anything in the kitchen but thet’d be better off if they stayed away from the stuff under the kitchen sink since the Drano I store there will likely kill them if they drink it. Adam chose to drink the Drano. By doing so, Adam changes the world so that we’re all more susceptible to sin. In other words, because of Adam and Eve’s decision to drink Drano we sort of acquired a taste for the Drano, even thought we know it will kill us. This is what gives Satan a foothold in our souls. He tells us the same lie (he is the Father of Lies after all) that he told Adam and Eve; namely that something that tastes this good won’t actually kill you. Once he gets us to take the first bite he can then tell us that we’re too broken and polluted for God to want to save so we might as well enjoy the Drano before it kills us because that’s really all we’re going to get.

So God has to figure out how to deal with our choice to drink the Drano without removing our free will to make that choice. God’s solution is to become human somehow without having to stop being God. He’s born as an infant to a virgin and after He’s made it to the right age where the people in His society will listen to what He has to say, Jesus, the person of the “Son”, begins to tell those around Him the truth about life and death and Drano and God the Father. This is the only time we see Satan directly war against Him because, I guess, Satan realizes that if God is really fully human then he’ll be tempted by the same things we all are; He’ll have the same taste for Drano we do and He’ll have to face the same choice we do: abstain from the Drano that tastes really, really good but will kill Him or drink the Drano and die. So Satan meets God in the desert and brings along the best tasting types of Drano that he can find and offers it to the Son.

The interesting thing is that the battle here isn’t really against Satan. It’s still against death. Jesus has to choose God’s way (life) or not God’s way (death). This is going to happen over and over again in Jesus’ time on earth. The really ironic thing is that at the end, in the other Garden, the Garden of Gethsemane, he’s got to make the same choice but this time the way He chooses life is to choose to die physically. By doing this He robs death of its power over us (and not just after His death but for all time). He undoes the Fall by dying and defeating death’s hold on all of us. Human beings no longer have to die spiritually because of Adam’s choice and our resulting taste for sin. That doesn’t mean that our taste for Drano is gone or that there aren’t still certain consequences for drinking it (you’re still going to have an upset stomach) but it does offer us a way of dealing with the poison.

There's more to come with this (one more installment I think). Thanks for putting up with my ramblings.

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Thursday, November 16, 2006

This semester I’ve been helping to facilitate a Bible study that looks at the question Jesus asks His disciples, “Who do you say I am?” by examining the titles given to or claimed by Jesus in the Gospel account of the John the Evangelist (St. John to some). The idea is to try to get some insight into Christ’s nature and relationship to us by looking at who He is in the Fourth Gospel. Of course, from the title of the series (“Who do you say I am?”) you can probably guess that we are spending a lot of time looking at the 7+1 “I Am” statements Jesus makes. The first seven of these are found in the Gospel spread between the sixth chapter and the fifteenth and involve the divine name associated with a qualifier such as I am the bread of life or I am the light of the world. The eight occurs at Christ’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane where He speaks “I am” and those who come to arrest Him fall to the ground.

I’ve studied these various statements several times in the past and have always found them to be highly instructive in helping me shape my understanding of who Christ was and is. The one that I always seemed having the most trouble with was the statement right before Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, “I am the resurrection and the life.” It just always seemed so obvious to me and overshadowed by the miracle/sign that follows it. As I prepared for the study and wrote the daily devotionals that I send out tot he students in the group, I began to see the deeper meaning of the passage.

The part I want to focus on is where it said that Jesus was “deeply moved in His spirit” when He sees Mary and again when He is standing before Lazarus’ tomb. I went and looked at the Greek for the word and found that it was more commonly translated as anger. Jesus isn’t deeply moved, He’s angry. So, I wondered, what was He angry about? As I thought about it I realized that He was angry about death. I realized that here was a God who created the Universe and nowhere does it mention that He created death. Now whether you read the Genesis creation stories literally or not, it is important that death (whether you interpret that as spiritual or physical is a matter of theological choice but I think that we are talking about death in a spiritual sense here) was not part of God’s creation. Death is brought into creation as a consequence of Adam’s choice in the Garden of Eden.

So when Christ encounters death and the pain and suffering it brings in Mary and at the tomb of Lazarus, He takes it kind of personally. All of the life in the creation came to be through Him so I think that anything that passes out of life and, in a sense perhaps, out of creation, has to really get under the Creator's "skin" so to speak. This is really powerful to me because it tells me that Christ not only takes death in a general way personally but He takes my death personally. I sort of see the idea of me dying as something Christ would get angry about, the way a friend gets angry when something wrong or bad is done to a friend.

Anyways, enough for now. I'll post more soon as I continue to work through these thoughts.

Thanks for reading

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Tuesday, November 07, 2006

I thought I'd write a brief review of Don Miller's "Searching for God Knows What" to supplement my brief review over at Amazon. In short, this book can be thought of as Miller's apologetic for a relational faith. What's an apologetic? Webster's defines it as a defense by speech or writing whereas the Greek roots of the word mean literally to "speak away from". To me an apologetic is an explain of why someone holds to an opinion or point of view. In "Searching", Don calls out the recent evangelical tendency to treat God and the Bible like some sort of formulaic, self-help book designed to get us into heaven. Instead, he calls us to read Scripture from a relational perspective and thus approach God relationally rather than transactionally.

One of the big metaphors used in the book is that of the "Lifeboat Game." You remember it from school; it was the game where you were in a lifeboat with a certain number of people and the lifeboat couldn't keep that many alive so you had to decide who got to stay and who had to die. Miller contends that we spend a lot of time and energy playing this sort of game in the brokenness of our lives and in the practice of our faith. He goes on to convincingly argue that such a perspective robs us of our humanity and cheapens the faith that we claim to live by. In a sense, the Lifeboat Mentality is exactly the same as Stephan Covey's explanation of "scarcity mentality" where people behave in terms of only their self-interest when they think resources are limited. If we think that God's grace is somehow limited then we have to go around showing that we have more value in His eyes than someone else or some other group.

The book is definitely written from Miller's own evolving theological perspective which I believe makes the book simultaneously both more authentic and more difficult to swallow. In places he states academic discourse as fact and fails to acknowledge the diversity of opinion and practice in things ranging from the authorship of Genesis to the nature of the sacraments (and their number). While I disagree with the perspective from which these statements flow (more or less from a fairly conservative, protestant, reformed perspective), what I found truly beautiful is that the tenor of the writing is much more strongly influenced by the mystical traditions of the Christian faith. Miller doesn't try to explain exactly who it all works but instead appeals to a spiritual response to the inherent truth of what he is writing.

For me, this book will be set beside C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity as an explanation of the Christian faith. Where Lewis is more rational in his discussion, Miller appeals to the desire we all have to be in relationship with the God who made us in both His likelness and image. I really strongly recommend this book to all those who find Christianity appealing but wish there were other voices besides the Christian right in the conversation.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Monday, November 06, 2006

No, this isn't some sort of ghoulish device designed to torture the poor sufferers of frequent urination syndrome or something like that.

It's our new puppy.

We have a new puppy around the house because a student found him on the side of the road up near Brooks and didn't know what to do with him. It turns out that we've been thinking of getting a pair of puppies so we said that we'd watch him for a couple of days until she could decide whether she could taking him home and add him to her "pack." That didn't work out so Murray (that's what we named him...after Murray Gell-Mann...just like Maxwell is named after James Clerk Maxwell and Cooper's named after Leon Cooper...so, we're geeks, what can we say) is back at our place. He's a great puppy. He's sweet and playful and smart. After just a couple of days he's already beginning to figure out some of the house routines.

The only problem is that he's a "pee machine". I've never seen a dog pee like this before. He likes to drink all the time and then he likes to pee all the time. We'll take him out and he'll pee two or three times and then be all rompery. Bring him in and within five minutes he's peed on the floor. Take him out and he pees again and then we do it again. The only way to turn off the faucet is to keep him from drinking but that makes him cry some. We're still working it out. To keep him from peeing all over the room when we're sleeping we crate him and he cries and barks because he wants to be out with the rest of us.

As I get older I find that I have less energy for puppies. They're great and fun and all but boy do they wear me out. Our two older dogs aren't sure how Murray's going to fit into the pack and we don't know how they'll work it out. I expect that given a few days they'll sort things out. If we decide to keep Murray we'll likely get another pup so that he has a playmate and won't bug the two goldens as much. Max is pretty patient and tolerant of him (expect when there's a toy or ball and its possession involved) but Cooper's not so sure. Murray likes to lick the big dogs on the nose but they don't like it too much. He wants to play with them so bad that he can't stand it and they aren't too sure they want to have anything to do with the little whirlwind tearing around the room. Max did teach Murray how roll over on his back and squirm around to get his belly scratched. He even taught him how to make noises which Murray thinks is about as much fun as anything he can imagine.

So anyways, the commercial about the terror of the puppy with a full bladder may be stupid (what the heck is 4-D cleaning power anyways...I'm sure Einstein didn't have industrial strength cleansers as part of the electromagnetic tensor) but we may be investing in gallons of the product before he's all grown up.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Well, in less than a week we American will head to the polls and send a new Congress to Washington and, here in Georgia, elect a Governor. On the national level, the mid-term elections are about a referendum about the present administration's policies and to judge the buzz, things look tight. Actually, they should look this tight. With the approval ratings of both Congress and the adminstration hovering just about the pathetic levels, one would think that the American people would go on one of their "throw the bums out" binges. You're not really seeing that, which I find surprising and troubling all at the same time.

Why aren't we clamouring to send our representatives (who we seem to fairly universally agree are doing a terrible job running the country) packing? One factor is the level of negative campaigning. Everyone paints everyone else as incompetent, corrupt, power hungry evildoers who are hell bent on destroying America and all it stands for. The level of this campaigning has grown so idiodic that most people view the political ads the same way they view the laundry detergent commercials that claim their soap is better than everyone else's. No one really belives the specifics. Just like everyone knows that laundry soap cleans their clothes and that the claims of the advertizers aren't really more true for one soap than another so too do the voters think that most politicians are vaguely dirty and will use their political office for personal gain at some level. Claims that this guy's worse than that guy are pretty much ignored. The other problem is that a lot of people have decided that parties are affiliated with movements. Evangelical Christians will vote Rebuplican because they've identified that party with their faith (incorrectly I feel...but that's for later). Labor Unions will vote for Democrats for basically the same reasons. It doesn't matter that Republicans have done nothing about issues like abortion and Democrats have been some of the biggest supporters of free trade agreements.

To me, I don't really care much. The big issue right now is the War in Iraq and, like I've said many times, I think it's the wrong issue. What we've learned in the last six years is that war is the worst way to solve a problem. I'll bet that a lot of Americans wish we'd listened when Hans Blix said that there weren't a lot of weapons of mass destruction and that sanctions should be given time to work. I'll bet the Iraqi people really wish we had listened. I support the troops and the near impossible situation they are in (how'd you like to have a ringside seat for a civil war Johnny???) but I don't support the policy (I know that's hard to imagine for some: supporting the troops without supporting the policy). We spend $2 billion a week in Iraq. That's more than twice as much as we spend on cancer research in a year and I'll bet cancer research is a lot more important to a lot more Americans than what we did in Iraq last week. But like I said, that's not the big issue to me.

The big issue is to balance the budget. You want to go to war? OK, great. But it's got to cost you something besides someone else's life. If we're going to spend $2 billion fighting terrorism then let's do that. But we should pay our bills as we go. Cut $100 billion out of the budget in other places. Cut seniors benefits. Cut law enforcement grants. Cut transportation funding. Want to give another tax cut or make the ones we have no permanent? OK, show me where you're going to slash that money from the budget. Cut soldier's salaries? Do less to perserve the historical things of this nation? I don't care so much what a candidate's priorities are as long as he or she lays them out for me to consider and he or she promises to work towards balancing the budget in one year. For me, if you do that right now then you get my vote. If you make that you're number one issue and I'll get out and work your campaign. To me this is why it blows my mind that the Evangelicals think the Republicans are their friends. In my expereince, conservative Christians have a strong desire to be fiscally responsible and yet they continue to vote for a party that has betayed that ideal over and over again in the last six years. The last President to balance the budget was a Democrat and a reviled one at that. Congress had a lot to do with that but somehow that's all changed.

I've said it before and I'll say it again to anyone who will listen. If you're a Presidential candidate for the 2008 election and you promise to make balancing the budget your number 1 priority not only will you get my vote but I'll work for your campaign to get you elected. To me, all the rest is window dressing. If we don't get the deficit erased and start paying back the debt, then this country is headed for a financial crisis of unprecidented proportions.

So there it is.

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