wallpapered minds

The Reason for God - The Good Book and tuning the TV

2011-11-07T08:43:00.000-08:00

Over the years I have had my fair share of frustrating moments trying to either tune the TV to the digital signal or get my now obsolete laptop to find and connect to the WIFI. The TV would keep telling me that the signal wasn't strong enough and offer me nothing more than a blue blank screen with no sound - a boring night in by anybody's standards! And, the old laptop seemed to have a similar attitude to WIFI connextions as my children have to brushing their teeth, an almost impenetrable list of excusses and necessary prior activities (as only MS Windows can do!).

Reading the Bible can seem like my two frustrating experiences. Firstly, the Bible can be difficult to tune into, and can seem like endless pages of incomprehesible words - not to dissimilar to my blue screen - which quickly becomes boring and so we reach for the remote to see something that does make sense... Or, it become difficult to connect with because I am constantly asking questions about some of the disturbing things I find there, and finding excusses being offered that are difficult to work through, with the growing feeling that I cannot connect with the Bible until I have signed up to proir beliefs.

These are two common frustrations with the Bible and become very real obsticles for further explorations into the Christian faith. Both these difficulties can be explored without leaving your brian in the other room. Firstly, a basic start point if you want to tune into the Bible (which is in itself a key question) is to focus on Jesus and the New Testament and get a translation that uses plain english!

However, the real obstacle can often be a fear of the Bible (and particularly Jesus) broadcasting a truth that we might need to respond to, and so the experience becomes something like my children's "I can't hear you" when their room's need to be tidied. As Tim Keller reminded us in The Reason for God video, no-one ever reads the Bible purely objectively, its message has too many deep and personal implications, and so it always provokes either a bias to reject and undermine it, or a bias to absorb and trust its content. This then prompts the question for me, how much do we want to tune in? There may be very little wrong with the signal afterall, and it could have far more to do with our ability to recieve the signal no matter how strong or true it may prove to be?

The other thing that I need to mention, to anyone serious about discovering God's message, is that God will have something to do with it! The Bible is like having a WIFI signal show up on your computers list of available networks, its holds much promise but it is useless without a connection, and God is the means by which that connection is established. So, we could read the whole Bible and never be aware of the vast wealth of meaning that it makes available because we remain disconnected - we need to invite God in to the mix, even if we are sceptical and full of doubts, seeking God may mean we have to ask the question "where are you?" as we open the New Testament (the Jesus focused part of the Bible).

I'll finish there. These are just blog thoughts and do prompt other questions...

Is the Bible literally true? (Audio only) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyEXQ3JZkUs&feature=related

And, for those with a head for the science discussions see http://www.testoffaith.com/.

The Reason for God...

2011-10-27T03:59:00.000-07:00

Over the coming weeks the Beacon Church is running the six session course developed by Tim Keller (Redeemer Presbyterian Church, NY). The Reason for God course covers some of the difficult questions that people ask about the Christian faith and attemps to respond to them. As the course unfolds I intend to blog about the interesting elements and discussions that arise from our time together. Hopefully, this will get me into the discipline of writing here again??! The first session is next Thursday 7.30pm at Costa Coffee Shop, Prospect Place, Dartford, and will be covering the questions - "Hasn't Science Disproved Christianity?" and "Isn't the Bible a Myth?"...

The paradoxical need for Hell...?

2011-06-22T07:20:00.000-07:00

Again, i just offer some thoughts on a complex and thorny subject, but the following pattern of thinking has offered me a slightly more accessible way of viewing the doctrine of Hell.

What remains an issue for me is the ability to fully reconcile an understanding of God as love with the eternal nature of Hell. It begs the question, at least for me, how can God continue to love those he is in some way eternally punishing. One can quicky justify punishment within a loving relationship when it leads to correction or prevents other more damaging things happening, like disciplining a child, but when there is no outcome from the punishment - i.e. it is eternal - in what way does God remain true to his nature of love? Also, does love have the capacity to punish without a meaning "beyond itself", or put another way, is love bound by its nature to embrace the "other" in the perfectly selfless maneuver we know as grace, thus for love to act in a manner that merely satisfies the "self" it unwittingly denies itself. In the same way then, a justification of hell that makes some kind of simplistic appeal to the "holiness" of God, with it demanding the punishment of the object of his love, reduces love to nothing - merely an indulgence, a gratification. If the Epistle of 1 John is right and God is love, then how can we maintain a mode of punishment that has no outcome - it is not corrective or redemptive, instead it plays out an eternal state of hopeless distress that seems to draw into question both God's holiness and his nature as love?

To respond to this nagging questions of mine I have begun to frame things in the wider context of the mechanics of salvation. This framing puts love into a double bind, a painful, heart breaking paradox that God's nature demands if salvation is to be a possibility. I begin with an analogy...

A father had many children whom he loved deeply. One day they become ill, very ill, a fatal and highly contagious disease. The father quickly realized they were all dying and so began work on a medicine to bring them back to health. The medicine cost the father dearly, but he happily paid the price. The medicine was then offered to the children, but to be effective it had to be taken by the mouth and taken willingly. The father saw that some of his children took it willingly and began to experience a renewal of life, but others looked at it and didn't like the smell or the colour, others weren't convinced they were going to die and so didn't feel they needed it, others were to preoccupied with the symptoms of the disease to notice what was on offer. What is the father to do in this situation? He loves them all, but if he leaves them together the disease will keep returning and infecting the life and future of those children who have already taken the medicine. To save some he must at some point separate them out. A moment of significant distress and pain for the father - but in love he must separate them - if the alternative is the death of them all he must make a way for those that have chosen to take the costly medicine to continue in its life. God in love must make a move to save those few, he does at no point cease to love them all, but the actions of free will and its consequences, which make possible faith and love, also place God in the pain of a double bind - there remains those who will be outside of life caught up in some way with the continuing effects of the disease - but to bring them in without a move of faith or love, without a willing acceptance of God's costly response both puts into jeopardy something of the raison d'étre of creation itself and negates the nature of the only possible medicine.

In this rather hasty and clumsy summation of my thinking I suggest hell as a place that is occupied by those who, in the space and time of life and the possibility of love and faith, have refused to freely engage with the fathers offer of eternal life; hell is then, the product of a necessary separation. In some very real way, hell is not for God's benefit but for ours, it makes possible an eternal future, it was never God's intention to have a separate place but, humanities use of its freedom has in some way demanded it, if the disease is to be eternally dealt with in those who accept God's offer of grace then the disease cannot continue to occupy that same space of life and eternal future. Hell as separation seems to me to be the best way to think on these things. However, it does not neatly satisfy every Biblical mention of hell, and leaves many questions still hanging... These are just some sketched thoughts on the thorny topic.

The other question that comes to mind (but I will not try and answer in this very long blog entry!) is the nature of hell as separation - in other words is hell a death - the natural result of the disease? Or is it the perpetual living out of the disease that we are eternally caught up in? I think I have said enough on the subject now! Next post will be about something else!!
As the wheat and the weeds are separated, the sheep and the goats, the fruitful from the unfruitful... hell as eternal separation rather than punishment?? Maybe!

A big question that keeps cropping up...

2011-05-12T03:53:00.000-07:00

The heaven and hell question came up again recently and after the "Love Wins" experience I am still left pondering how best to think about these two realities.

For most Christians the idea of Hell presents us with a series of stark and sobering possibilities that challenges us, often to our core. These are just two of those possibilities. Firstly, how can I be truly happy in heaven if I know that several/many people I love are not with me but rather are in hell? And then, to simply say that I'll be too happy to be bothered makes heaven into a narcotic of forgetting, which begins to sound rather sinister. Secondly, as Rob Bell highlights, how can a God of love be compatible with eternal punishment, the kind that realizes our deepest fears about ourselves and the world, and plays on our capacity for experiencing pain, loneliness, despair, and torment. In what way does God require or demand this kind of eternal punishment? Is it His holiness? Is it His goodness? Or, perhaps His very nature of being "love"? How can these attributes of God make such cruel and hopeless demands of a fallen and lost humanity?

Whilst not wanting to stray from my evangelical roots I still have that nagging question about the nature of hell. It is, as C. S. Lewis also lamented, one of those deeply troubling teachings of Jesus that if we could some how circumnavigate it the Christian God would be far more palatable, rational, and compatible to our limited notions of love and justice. Alas, this is not possible if we aim to remain true to the teaching of both Jesus and the wider Biblical witness on the subject.

However, prompted in some way by Rob Bell's provocative work, I do think that there is a thick gloss covering certain ideas about hell. These additional layers have been added over the years, as many historians document, by medieval church authorized art, developments in theology and the influence of Platonic philosophy (and other Greek thinking). Whilst not forgetting culturally conditioned depictions and understandings of hell that propagated and validated certain power structures both ecclesial and political in nature, and the many other important influences that have shaped what is deemed true about hell over the centuries. Do we, as Bell seems to suggest, need to rediscover a Jewish understanding of hell and attempt the impossible leap back to very early church ideas? I am not sure that is a realistic option, at least in the sense that a truth about this issue can genuinely be uncovered, clean, un-tampered with, and pristine, but there is still much merit in the task and its ability to allow the church in the 21st century to revisit, wrestle with, and re-frame these important ideas about hell and is relation to the nature of God. This is not a call to abandon well established ideas, or our evangelical heritage, but rather to make notions of hell and its reality "our own" in a new context because to simply keep rehearsing ideas on this subject that belong to a past generation will keep mis-communicating, and make an already foreign and unsettling idea utterly incomprehensible at best, and irredeemably repulsive at worst. Surely, hell should never become a stumbling block to finding grace? Or, should its reality prompt us to take "grace" more seriously? Or, could hell make us consider the paradox of love and the pain of its double bind (I will write more on this...)?

In short I welcome the vital debate and rediscovery of important ideas surrounding the nature of hell and all it implicates about the nature of God and the need of the Gospel. Not least for the sake of effective and relevant mission and the need for an apologetic fit for purpose.

Again, just some thoughts on the subject. I feel I need to say more on this and offer some metaphors that might be helpful in re-framing these ideas but enough for today me thinks!

Faith Hope Love... Wins

2011-04-26T03:09:00.000-07:00

I want to celebrate this simple yet immensely provocative book - "Love Wins" by Rob Bell. It both unsettles me and yet fills me with an affirming hope in the nature and power of God's grace. I also want to promote the idea that the evangelical wing of the church perhaps needs to re-engage with the wild and excessive nature of grace and the poverty/wealth of mystery it leaves us with. Where is Gandhi? God knows! I don't. And who I am I to offer a guess, the issue of judgment and all things eternal is a little above my pay grade! Rob Bell is quite right and I want to affirm the maddening nature of God's grace - that it seems to penetrate the world without respecting borders, ideologies, and religious systems (necessarily), and yet makes the demand of transformation and re-creation - death and resurrection. I see grace as an invitation into the advance of a coming Kingdom, and Jesus is the King!

On a broader note, there is one issue I want to question concerning "Love Wins" that relates to the possibility of accepting God's grace after death. Rob Bell does not categorically state that the offer of grace continues beyond death, but he does seem to support the idea that this could be possible and that it affirms a particular view of God as love. If God so wishes to continue the offer of grace beyond the grave then that's fine by me! But, from a Biblical perspective is there more we need to consider? The point that raises its head for me when reading "Love Wins" is not only the nature of God's love and grace but also the nature of faith and hope, and their seemingly integral role in the outworking of transformative re-creation i.e. to belong to heaven (the now and not yet Kingdom) involves the blindness of faith and the horizon of hope (mist, movement, and a compass).

If salvation comes through faith then the fallen nature of the world maintains this possibility. Faith requires a certain blindness, a blurred mirror, a slightly skewed view on reality - welcome to our world - since any movement or decision based on an un-compromised knowledge of life, the universe, and God would not require any faith - you have the power to decide independent of any lack or risk. Faith requires a deep level of self giving - sacrifice - where we risk ourselves entirely in the moment of decision. We don't know for sure but we step out and continue to move towards a "hoped for" horizon - real faith always keeps moving - if it stays still it becomes a retrospective dogma! Hence disciples not converts! Thus to be exposed to the full reality of God and his re-created world - denies the possibility of faith, the risk is no longer possible, the sacrifice cannot be made, it is too late, the horizon has been realized. Is death then the end of a window of faith, a point at which we move into another reality that is no longer compromised, where we cannot say "I believe" because belief is not necessary.

Love/grace reaches into the world, and I believe it is far from "cut and dried" as to who will be caught up in the unending Kingdom life offered in Jesus, and who will be outside this life. But, at the same time I still want to affirm the idea that there is a "too late", and that the response to grace requires a level of faith and hope, sacrifice and movement, that Rob Bell alludes to in several places, but does not develop fully. Whilst a "too late" will continue to throw up uneasy questions for us we cannot circumnavigate the narrow opportunity to truly offer ourselves in the moment of faith and the movement of hope.

Whilst I write this I am only to aware of how many wider questions all this throws up, but here's my two penny worth for now!

Love Wins!

2011-04-10T03:13:00.000-07:00

Nooma marked my first encounter with Rob Bell. I was impressed with the quality and connectedness of his teaching and style, which evidently many many others were too as the DVD series quickly became a huge success here in the UK. I have often gone out for a long run with one of Rob Bell's podcasts from Mars Hill playing in the background, and have often found the freshness he brings to familiar Biblical passages both challenging and yet penetratingly relevant. He brings the Biblical text into the context of a changing culture and lets it powerfully speak into the world - sometimes a kin to detonating an incendiary device. Suffice to say, I have deep respect for Rob Bell, whilst not always agreeing with everything he draws out of the Biblical text he remains a much needed prophetic voice - a challenging voice that will not let you do anything other than think, question, and re-engage with God's word.

There has been considerable controversy over Rob Bell's latest book "Love Wins" and over the next week or so I plan to put some of my own thoughts and responses as I read it. From what I have read so far the book presents many of the questions I hear every week about the nature of life and death from people in their 20's and 30's who have little or no faith experience. I hope Rob finds the balance of responding without answering - or as I began to mention previously, an apologetic that keeps the question alive and provocatively entangled in the life of faith that may follow!

Now to chapter one...

Apologetics - Outmoded or Desperately Needed? (Some thoughts...)

2011-04-01T00:41:00.000-07:00

One thing I have become increasingly aware of over this past year is the changing nature of the "truth" quest. The pursuit of something spiritually meaningful in life is almost entirely dominated by the information porthole of the internet, particularly blogs and You Tube. I am no stranger to the fact that this has been the case for several years, what has caught me off guard is the way in which the internet's vast information content is shutting down conversation rather than necessarily promoting it.

Through some of the wider conversations I have had with people I get the impression that seekers very quickly get bogged down in information overload and simply give up, or at best they see no cohesive message (at least one they trust). It's a little like running an ice-breaker ship into the pack ice of information, it requires a lot of energy to keep breaking the information up and making sense of it and moving forward towards some sense of truth. The temptation is to stop pursuing all the avenues, to stop looking behind each truth claim, to no-longer attempt to debunk the latest conspiracy theory, and simply sit passively in the mess - which quickly solidifies around you to form a spiritual pseudo-narrative. This narrative describes nothing more than where you find yourself and where you passively remain as you re-articulate your position through the increasingly rehearsed personal narrative. I sense through these conversations (with those seeking something that is transcendent and truly life giving) that the greatest prize is hope, an horizon to head for, a bearing to continue on. Not a return to an all embracing meta-narrative (which ironically also "passively sits in the mess") but to rather glimpse a "city on a hill" and to begin a journey of discovery as they make their way towards it.

The most worrying element of the conversations I have found myself in is the increasing tendency of young adults, well educated sensible people, to be captivated by internet fueled conspiracy theories (I say captivated because they would not say they wholeheartedly believed them, but rather just get drawn into their paranoia and cynicism). The academic observers of our culture have highlighted the tendency towards conspiracy theories for some 20+ years, and particularly after the 9/11 attacks in New York, but I had never come across this in any meaningful way until recently.

Some in the life of the church think that Christian apologetics has had its day but, with the increasing confusion and information overload I am witnessing, effective and honest apologetics seems needed more today than perhaps ever before. We need to become guides and conversation partners that have a a map and compass within the cacophany of competing voices that seek to influence and capitalize on people who are seeking some kind of truth in an often senseless world. As I mentioned above, it seems to me that there are many seekers out there, but who have been brought to a halt in their search by the sheer weight of the vast, conflicting, contradicting, strange, paranoid, and often dubious, sources of information. Good genuine seekers of truth are often left bewildered - with a sense of hopelessness and anxiety - that the world cannot offer them clarity on some of the biggest questions humanity insists on asking. I am not advocating the idea that the Bible and orthodox Christianity has everything neatly sewn-up, or that through coherent prepositional truths we can find real solid answers (I think the postmodern debate has debunked that idea) but rather that a seeker can find "truth" by looking for God and not information about him. The "city on the hill" is not made real by the sum of it's tourist guides and brochures but rather by entering its gates and wondering its streets. God is truly discovered relationally and not intellectually, and that Jesus, when taken seriously, offers us a means of discovering this relational connection with the divine loving creator, and that this connection is not the result of our own efforts, but rather a gracious "hand taking hold of ours" and leading us into real life. I want to see in my own ministry a development of a a type of conversational apologetics that promotes hope and the discovery of a relationship with God - and in doing so is able to contend with and respond to the paralyzing nature of our information age.

The question becomes one of faith and relational openness to God as revealed and offered to us in Jesus. Will we take hold of the hand? As Jesus points out, "seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you". Hope becomes a means of renewing the seeker, enabling them to push on through the ice-pack because there is a possible destination, apologetics at its best, renews the debate and renews a sense of hope. We need to let people be good and informed seekers, because good seekers make good disciples - only those with a passion to find God will have enough drive to make the biggest (and paradoxically the smallest) leap of their lives, a leap of faith into the embrace of God made real and available in Jesus of Nazareth - God amongst us.