Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

 

Retired Bible Professor,

Bob Jones University

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On Weather and Fables

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As I post this, Hurricane Florence is bearing down on the Carolinas, predicted to make landfall today and to reach here in the SC Upstate over the weekend. For days we’ve been hearing about how bad this storm is, with dire warnings to run for your life if you’re on the coast—and this one, they say, will have surprisingly destructive force far inland, even here above the fall line.

I believe them. But a lot of people don’t. They’re staying put. And the local first responders are collecting the names of their next of kin so they can notify them after the fools are dead.

Why don’t people listen to such grave warnings?

Well, some people are just foolish. That’s part of human nature. But I think these days there’s more involved.

In recent years journalism has become almost entirely ratings driven. Every story has to be hyped. Local news desks give you a teaser at 8 pm so you’ll tune in at 11—and when you do, the story turns out to be not as big a deal as the teaser implied. In fact, the teaser is more like a National Enquirer headline than actual journalism. And the national desks do it as well. For some time now, Fox News’s Bret Baier has been introducing his evening broadcast—“Special Report”—with an “ALERT” logo—to imply that there’s breaking news, when usually there isn’t.

Everything’s a Big Deal. Go for the adrenaline. Capture the eyeballs. Every day.

And the weather folks are doing it too. Local and national weatherpeople, even the agencies that feed them information—the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center, and so on. Every storm is the Storm of the Century, or the Snowpocalypse, or some other frightening neologism.

And they start saying these things 5 or 6 days out, before they can have any sort of reading of the storm with any scientific basis. At that point they can’t predict the path—but it MIGHT hit a population center!—or the intensity or the size of the storm. But they can get several days of good ratings by fearmongering.

Why do they do this? I’m sure they would say that they’re doing a public service by giving the population plenty of time to prepare for any eventuality. And they do, and for that I’m grateful.

But I think it’s demonstrable that there are other reasons as well. For the news outlets, they want the ratings, the eyeballs, because that drives the ad fees, and that means money in their pockets. For the agencies, they want the exposure, because that usually turns into stable future funding. There’s a strong element of self-interest in this.

Which is fine—capitalism and all that—except that there’s a downside.

As Aesop noted all those centuries ago, when the boy cries “Wolf!” repeatedly, eventually people stop believing him—even when he’s telling the truth.

Now, lots of people in Charleston remember Hugo, and lots of people in New Orleans remember Camille and Katrina, and they’re wise enough to get ready and get out. We’ve seen the interstates looking like parking lots the last couple of days, and I had a visitor in my class this morning who’s been evacuated from his school down on the coast.

But other people in hurricane-prone areas have heard repeated frenetic warnings about literally every storm with a snowball’s chance of reaching any point of the North American coastline. And in many cases those storms were described superlatively—this is a rare and even unique threat. And in most of those cases, the warnings haven’t panned out—usually because the hype started before there was any scientific basis for it.

When you’ve seen that happen a few times, you’re tempted to start downplaying the warnings. Significant numbers of people who live on the coast, and who can remember the last 20 years, are going to board up their windows, buy some batteries and bottled water, and settle in to watch the storm through their beach-facing picture windows.

And eventually, some of them are going to die—probably in great quantities, during the same genuinely powerful storm.

And whose fault is that? Might there be blame for more people than just the ones who died?

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

On My Father’s 100th Birthday

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Today would have been my father’s 100th birthday. He lived only (?!) to the age of 90, but he had a really interesting life—railroad conductor, printer, pilot, kinda travel agent, small business owner. He was never boring. Scary maybe, but never boring.

The thing that I find really remarkable about his life is the amount of change he saw.

He was born on the frontier. His father, after the murder of his own father, headed west from Missouri looking for opportunity. Eventually he homesteaded—that Homestead Act was a real boon to upward mobility—just below the Continental Divide outside Salmon, Idaho, on land that no one had ever tamed before, and he and his wife and 11 children worked like oxen to make a living for themselves.

And here’s the thing. They lived, in 1918, pretty much the same way people lived in Abraham’s day. They built their own houses by hand, carried water in from the creek, fended off the darkness with oil lamps, powered their farming with animals, and did their excretory business in a hole in the ground. Oh, eventually they got electricity, and my grandfather even bought a car before it was all over, but when Dad was born, the routine of daily life hadn’t changed much for 4000 years.

Dad’s mother died when he was 7, and his father when he was 13, and from then on he was raised relatively haphazardly by a series of older siblings as they were able. Graduated from high school a year or two late, eventually served his country in World War II—as part of the greatest generation—and came home to work with his hands to scrape together a thousand bucks or two every year to feed the wife and three kids. Leave it to Beaver, indeed.

Not well educated, but a constant reader, he created a fully organic subsistence farm, before hardly anybody was even talking about such things, on a mere two acres of land in (really) Greenacres, Washington, then piled the whole family into a Rambler station wagon and a ’54 Nash to move clear across the country for a white-collar job. (No, my name’s not Joad.)

After they finally got the kids out of the house, he and Mom retired to southern New Mexico, where within a few short years Mom died and he was left pretty much alone with his tool-sharpening shop. After he’d spent 25 years there, an ER doctor called me from New Mexico and said, “You need to come get your Dad.”

And for the last 6 years of his life, as his well-used but well-worn mind slowly ebbed, I cared for him as he needed it, but left him his independence as much as I thought was safe.

And one evening the two of us sat together at my computer, fired up Google Earth, and went back to Salmon. He guided me up the Salmon River to Baker, where he went to school (yep, on horseback, in the snow) and then north up Sandy Creek to the old homestead. It was right here, on the west side, he said. And I dropped the perspective as low as I could, and we stood on the old land and looked up Sandy Creek to the Divide, where he’d hiked over into Montana one time when he was a teen and got upset with somebody.

In one lifetime, he went from the days of Abraham to Web-based virtual reality on a laptop. In one lifetime, his life changed in pretty much all the ways that the world has changed since it began.

What a time to be alive.

Dad didn’t make it to 100—here, anyway—and I’m confident that he wouldn’t have wanted to. But what a life he had, and what lives he has left behind. Sons and daughters who have all known success, all in remarkably different ways. Two grandsons who are Service Academy graduates, and two granddaughters with great abilities and extensive experiences around the world.

And life, for him, goes on, in a way that I don’t have the experience to describe.

Hallelujah.

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On Asking about Ethnicity

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In his column at National Review last week, Jim Geraghty thought out loud about a New York Times book review of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies that Bind. (Did you follow all that?) Appiah raises concerns about the way introductions work. Pretty much everybody, on meeting somebody else, asks questions about him—where are you from? where do you work? Appiah suggests that this tendency to want to categorize people might often imply a sort of racism or at least stereotyping.

Geraghty thinks that identity politics might be contributing to that. Immigrants. Wall Streeters. NRA members. Police officers. We react instinctively to certain groups, positively or negatively, depending on where we are on the political or cultural spectrum. He observes that this kind of thinking contradicts the very idea of America as a place where anybody can become anything with enough hard work and perhaps a little luck (or providence). Upward mobility. No feudalism. All that.

I think Geraghty is right, and based on his description of Appiah’s book—which I haven’t read—I suspect that the latter is right on that point too. I’ve found myself making assumptions about someone I’m meeting, based on his occupation or his appearance or some other information he offers about himself. We shouldn’t do that. People are individuals, not merely members of a class.

My ethnicity is German—as is obvious from my last name. But I’d think anybody who gave me a Nazi salute was just plain weird. I was born in Washington State, but I’m not a liberal Democrat. (In fact the area of the state where I was born is rock-ribbed conservative Republican, largely for reasons of physical geography—which, while interesting, is completely off our topic.) I spent my teen years in Boston, but I don’t park my car in Harvard Yard, and frankly, I’m tired of hearing about it from people who think they’re being original and clever. I live in the South, but I’m not an advocate of the Lost Cause. I don’t like being stereotyped, and Jesus tells me that in that case I shouldn’t stereotype others.

But just a minute here. If we shouldn’t stereotype the person we’re meeting, then observers of the conversation shouldn’t stereotype the person asking the questions, either.

Sure, sometimes people ask those questions in order to put the stranger into a box—to stereotype him. But not everybody does.

On a good day, when I ask a person what he does, it’s not to prejudge him—it’s to find a point of contact, to further deepen the relationship—which so far is pretty shallow.

  • You’re a pilot? I love that! My Dad was a private pilot, and I got to do a lot of flying when I was a kid. There’s nothing like the top side of a cloud.
  • You’re a waiter in a restaurant? I did that for a year. Hardest work I ever did. Good for you. Are people tipping better these days than they used to?

And that goes for geography too.

  • You’re from Boston? What part? Ah, Revere. Love the North Shore. Ever get up to Gloucester and Rockport? Boy, I miss the fish!

Here’s the sad part. Because of a lot of past sins, Americans are really, really sensitive about race—or as I prefer to say, ethnicity. You can’t talk about it without feeling like you’re stepping on eggshells, and if you talk about it much, people tend to wonder what you’re up to.

But I find ethnicity just as interesting as occupation or birthplace. If I’m meeting a black person, and I detect what sounds like one of many African accents, I really, really want to ask where he’s from. And sometimes I do. If I were to meet Dr. Appiah—Geraghty mentioned that he’s Ghanaian—I’d be all over that.

  • Where in Ghana? Accra? I love that city! What do you think of Papaye Chicken in Osu? Do you ever get up north, to the rural areas? What about the Upper West? What wonderful people! The most patient man I ever met was a Ghanaian pastor in the Upper West. And that Volta Dam is a remarkable achievement, isn’t it?

Now, as it happens, Dr. Appiah is of Ghanaian descent, but he was born in London, so he might surprise me by saying, “I’ve never actually been to Ghana.” And that’s fine. We can talk about London instead.

Sure, the person is more than these things. But he is these things, and what else he is, is molded, or perhaps reflected, by these things and many others. What’s wrong with wanting to know him as well as you can?

Let’s take this a little further. I’m intrigued by all the variations in skin color that human genes can produce. I know someone whose mother is Puerto Rican and whose father is Italian. I know someone else whose mother is Spanish and whose father is British. And another whose mother is Mexican and whose father is a New Zealander.

All of this is really cool. Unusual mixtures of genes and cultures and accents and perspectives. I want to interrogate such people about all of that.

Maybe someday we’ll be able to do that without people getting all nervous.

I really hope so.

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On Funerals for Politicians

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This past Saturday was the funeral for John McCain, a long-time US senator and, many years ago, a long-time prisoner of war in Vietnam. In our hotly divided political climate, even his funeral became big news and a source of political contention.

I’m not going to weigh in on the politics of it all. There’s no lack of voices doing that, and the question of whether his funeral was too political or not is none of my business and frankly none of yours either. On the matter of what’s done at his funeral, I think the decision is the family’s to make, and the family’s alone. But the controversy does bring to mind some implications that go far beyond the politics of any moment, implications that we ought to consider—“we” being not just those with an interest in the American political process, but anyone with an interest in any political process.

Most news outlets have noted the tributes given to McCain by political friend and foe alike. Perhaps the best example is a line from former President Obama, who said, “So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse, can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult, in phony controversies and manufactured outrage. … We never doubted the other man’s sincerity or the other man’s patriotism, or that when all was said and done, we were on the same team.”

Responses to Mr. Obama’s words, and to others like them, have typically been driven by political motives. Those on the political left have celebrated the fact that the former president, who ran against and defeated McCain in a presidential election, could speak so respectfully and generously of him. Those who voted against Obama in that election, however, accuse him, and all the other political liberals who are now lauding McCain’s “maverick spirit” and “honor” and “principles,” of being hypocrites, especially given the vitriolic language heaped on McCain by those same opponents and their campaign supporters in that election.

What interests me in all this is not Mr. Obama’s words or any of the other recent commendations. What interests me is what those words tell us about the earlier political campaign. All those excoriations, all those dire warnings during the campaign about how dangerous McCain was, or how hateful or personally flawed he was, were actually meaningless; by their own present words, McCain’s political foes actually respected him and saw him as virtuous—on the same team, as Mr. Obama put it. But they reviled him back then, because politics, you know. Have to win the election. Say whatever it takes.

And let’s not pretend that only the political left does that. Those on the right are just as inclined—aren’t they?—to say things that aren’t true just to get their guy elected, or to get votes for this or that piece of legislation.

John McCain died of cancer, a particular type of cancer—glioblastoma—that crouches in my mind as well. It killed my brother, and it killed my pastor, the man whose signature is on the paperwork that forms the legal basis for the decades of life my wife and I have shared. A friend of mine, a neurosurgeon, once told me that glioblastoma is a just a nasty piece of work, and he said he hopes he’s seen the last of it he’ll ever see. It’s the worst.

But I’m not sure it is. There’s another cancer, one that infests our national brain and is killing our ability to govern ourselves as surely as glioblastoma killed John McCain. With the size of our federal government, and consequently the power at stake in every national election, the desperation to win leads us to savage ourselves with lies, to say whatever it takes to get our way. And our leaders acknowledge that, whenever they say that this or that vitriolic conflict is “just politics.”

How healthy, how healthful, can a system be that is based on lies?

It’s a mark of strength when we can speak respectfully of the dead, with whom we disagreed in life. But it’s a mark of great sickness when in doing so we put the lie to how we lived.

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On Reading Job (the Book, not the Occupation), Part 2

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Part 1

While the question of Job’s historicity affects the way we read the book, there’s another matter that affects us far more significantly.

I’ve noticed that many Christians treat Job as though it were Proverbs. They’ll find a verse that says something they like, and they’ll post it as though it applies to us, even without context.

  • “Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward” (Job 5.7).
  • “Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?” (Job 11.7-8).
  • “The light of the wicked shall be put out” (Job 18.5).
  • “Is it any pleasure to the Almighty, that thou art righteous?” (Job 22.3).
  • “The spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life” (Job 33.4).
  • “How forceful are upright words!” (Job 6.25).
  • “Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble” (Job 14.1).
  • “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me” (Job 19.25-27).
  • “He knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold” (Job 23.10).
  • “He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing” (Job 26.7).
  • “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding” (Job 28.28).

These are powerful words that have been precious to generations of Christians. And I’m not saying they shouldn’t be. But there’s a pitfall here that we should be wise enough to avoid.

The quotations in the first section above are from the mouths of Job’s 3 friends. The second section is from Elihu, the young bystander. And the third section is from Job himself.

Now, what do we know about these 5 men? For starters, we know that all of them—all of them—were wrong about some things. God is much harder on Job’s friends than on Job himself (Job 42.7), but with his first words at the end of the book he makes it clear that Job too has problems with his thinking:

“Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” (Job 38.2).

The word this here is singular, and the previous verse indicates that God is speaking specifically to Job. He, too, is “without knowledge.” And the extended argument that follows, all the way through Job 40.2, is directed specifically at Job.

Job responds by condemning himself (Job 40.3-5). And God’s response is not to try to soften the blow; he doubles down, so to speak, at considerable length (Job 40.6-41.34), leading Job to repeat his words of repentance (Job 42.1-6).

But before it’s over, God pays him a remarkable compliment: Job, he says, “has spoken of me the thing that is right” (Job 42.7). And then he says it again (Job 42.8). Job, he says, “I will accept” (Job 42.8).

And the rest of the story, which we know well, shows God pouring his blessings out on Job.

So there’s a lot to appreciate in and learn from the man Job, but when we read his words, and especially the words of his 3 friends and Eliphaz, we can’t take them as authoritatively true; they’re not Proverbs. Oh, they may well be true, but we don’t know that without confirming them from elsewhere in Scripture. Eliphaz certainly gives us good advice when he says, “If you return to the Almighty you will be built up; … then you will delight yourself in the Almighty and lift up your face to God. You will make your prayer to him, and he will hear you” (Job 22.23-27). But his words are not true in relation to Job’s specific situation—Job’s troubles weren’t the result of his being distant from God—though they’re often true of us. We know that not because Eliphaz said them, or simply because the statement appears in the biblical book of Job, but because it is confirmed by countless other passages of Scripture, whose contexts indicate that they, unlike these, are authoritative.

Context is a really big deal. We all benefit when we pay attention to it.

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On Reading Job (the Book, not the Occupation), Part 1

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Not long ago I posted some thoughts on reading Leviticus and Numbers, so I suppose by this post I’m continuing an informal, as-circumstances-warrant kind of series.

Job is an unusual book. For starters, most Christians have known the story since Sunday school, but hardly any of them know much about most of the book. They know the narrative of the first 2 chapters and the last chapter, and they know generally about God’s speech to Job that is the climax of the book in chapters 38-41, but pretty much all the rest of it—the extended conversation among Job, his three friends, and a young observer named Elihu—are essentially “flyover country.” If you asked most lifelong readers of the Bible to summarize the speeches of Eliphaz as distinguished from those of Zophar, not only could they not do it, but they might not even recognize the names. We’ve missed a lot.

I’d like to comment about a couple of issues connected with reading and understanding the book better.

First is the question of genre. Is it history or fiction? Since we read literature differently depending on its genre, the question matters.

The first thing we notice is that the story seems to stand apart from the historical metanarrative that makes up the rest of Scripture. No one knows where the “land of Uz” (Job 1.1) is; though the place name is mentioned in connection with the Philistines (Jer 25.20) and with Edom (Lam 4.21), no one is even sure that the latter two are the same location as the one mentioned in Job. The word does appear as a personal name in the Israelite genealogies (Gen 10.23; 36.28; 1Chr 1.17, 42), but there’s nothing in all of that information that lets us put Job anywhere certain.

There’s also no reference in the book to any of the patriarchs; the long conversation makes no reference to Noah or Abraham or Moses or David or anybody else that sounds familiar. There’s no unambiguous reference to the Law (Job 22.22?), or to God’s Word in the written sense (cf Job 6.10; 23.12; 42.7).

Job is mentioned by other biblical writers (Ezek 14.14, 20; James 5.11 [Gen 46.13 probably names a different person]). Ezekiel mentions him alongside Noah and Daniel (though there’s an interpretational argument over whether the Daniel here is the same as in the biblical book), both of whom I take to be historical characters, and that to imply that Job is as well.

James alludes to him in a way that implies he’s talking about the character in the book of Job. Does this prove that the story is true? Well, Jesus told fiction stories to teach moral lessons—we call them parables—but they don’t use personal names. (I don’t think his story of Lazarus and the rich man is a parable.) OT writers, including Job himself, refer to a fictional character named Rahab (Job 9.13; Ps 87.4; 89.10; Isa 51.9), common in ancient Near Eastern mythology (and not the prostitute from Jericho). So it’s not impossible that James is using a fictional character to teach a moral lesson.

Some scholars argue that the extended poetic conversation is not likely to have happened extemporaneously—who talks like that, anyway? But we should note that while you and I don’t typically make up poetry on the fly, the poetry of that culture was different in ways that might make poetry extempore possible. Most significantly, their poetry doesn’t have rhyme or meter, which is much of what makes poetry hard for us. They “rhyme” concepts rather than words (e.g. Ps 1.5-6; Ps 24.1-2). And further, there’s no reason to think that the characters in Job couldn’t have taken a few minutes to sketch out their thoughts before they spoke, even perhaps taking notes (in the dirt? on a clay tablet?) while another was speaking, debate-style.

So while the situation is mildly muddy, I’m inclined to think that the events in the book really happened. This means that Satan really appears in God’s presence and that God converses with him. It also means that ancient peoples were a lot smarter than the stereotypical cavemen. Your homework is to think about what other differences the historicity of the book makes.

Next time we’ll look at something else you need to keep in mind as you read the book.

Part 2

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On Integrating to a New Culture

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On August 10, Martha Bishara was on a lot across the street from her house in Chatsworth, Georgia, collecting dandelions to make salad. She was carrying a knife to get the dandelions. The owner of the lot called the police.

When the police arrived, they ordered her to drop the knife. She didn’t, and started walking away. They ordered her to stop. She didn’t.

So they hit her with a Taser. Failure to respond to police commands, while openly carrying a weapon.

Seems simple enough.

But, as most of you know, it isn’t.

Mrs. Bishara is a (legal) immigrant from Syria, who speaks very little English and so did not understand the officer’s commands.

She’s 87 years old and 5 feet tall, and she has trouble walking.

And they Tased her.

The story has gotten a lot of circulation, generating pretty much universal condemnation. And FWIW, I’m repulsed by what happened as well.

But I think there is a teaching moment here.

I’m not interested in ascribing blame. That’s not my right or responsibility, and people far more qualified than I will address that. Not having been there, and not having police training, I’m ignorant of a lot of what’s necessary to deliver a binding judgment. I have friends who are police officers, including one who used to be a police chief in Georgia, and I have to reserve the possibility that something I don’t know could change my entire perspective on the situation.

Though that’s hard to imagine.

So, no final judgments.

And thus my thoughts turn to how something like this might have been prevented.

There are lots of possibilities. Better training? More, um, common sense? Something else?

One occurs to me.

I’m thinking out loud, in public, and that’s really dangerous. I know that what I’m about to say is going to be controversial, especially to those who are inclined to knee-jerk about The Cause of the Day. I would ask only that you hear me out and actually consider the logic of the idea I’m tentatively suggesting.

Mrs. Bishara has been in the States for more than 20 years. She speaks hardly any English.

Maybe there are good reasons for that. Maybe she has a learning disability. Maybe she’s tried repeatedly and just can’t do it. When she arrived here, she was older than I am now, and I can feel my brain cells dying by the day. I am recognizing my own ignorance by not saying that it’s her own fault.

But her case illustrates one danger of not learning the local language, which is just one part of cultural integration.

Cultural integration, what most people mistakenly call “assimilation,” has gotten a bad rap lately. It’s been equated with imperialism, with cultural elitism. And sometimes, certainly, those things have been involved.

But if you move to another country, it’s just plain good sense to make some adjustments—most critically, to learn the language as well as you can.

I take American students to Africa pretty much every year. Each year that we go to Tanzania, we spend 2 or 3 days teaching the newbs enough Swahili to be able to participate in the daily greetings—a very significant thing in Tanzanian culture—and to buy something in the market. (Starvation, and all that.) Without being able to do those things, they’re not going to be able to show respect to the nationals, to greet them in the ways that the nationals expect; and further, they’re vulnerable out in the city in ways they don’t need to be.

If they were going to stay for more than just 3 to 5 weeks, they would need to learn more.

This last trip, we were on our way to the airport when we were pulled over by a policeman for a random inspection. Our missionary host was driving; I was riding shotgun (without one, fortunately). The officer seemed quite agitated, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Afterwards my host informed me that I had been cited for not wearing a seat belt, and fined 35,000 shillings. (Freak out thou not; that’s about $15.) What if my host hadn’t been there? I could legally have driven myself to the airport; what if I had?

Better learn the language.

I’m not suggesting that one’s personal cultural identity should be sacrificed. I spent about a decade living in Boston, where the North End is famously Italian and the South End is Irish. Both cultures are working-class Catholic, but they have significant differences as well—differences that sometimes have ended in blows. These groups have retained strong ties to the Old World and to their cultural heritage.

Good for them.

But if a cop stops any of them on the street, they’ll know what he’s saying.

Not being able to do that can get you hurt. Or dead.

Respect the culture you’re entering enough to learn to function safely and effectively in it.

In this case, loving your neighbor ends up benefiting you. A lot.

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Groovier Than Thou

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Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Mat 28.19-20).

This is the Big One, the Prime Directive. If we don’t give attention to this, nothing else matters. The church’s job—the individual believer’s job—is to present the gospel to everyone on earth, evangelizing, baptizing, teaching.

This despite the fact that most people aren’t interested (Rom 3.9-18), and that most people, apparently, will never be interested (Mat 7.13-14).

So how do we catch their interest?

There are 2 schools of thought on that.

  • We make the gospel as attractive as possible by excelling at everything we do, particularly at those things that are already interesting to the people we’re trying to reach. We become the best at academic pursuits, at artistic pursuits, at athletic pursuits, at anything that will provide a bridge to the unbeliever.
  • We present the gospel as winsomely as possible, but we let it speak for itself. We depend on the Holy Spirit to do the attracting.

I grew up in churches that held to the first view. It was the 60s, and many of us Christians tried to be as groovy as everyone around us, as a lever for inciting interest in the Lord we served. “Real peace through Jesus, baby.”

Sidebar: I know the word groovy hasn’t occurred to anybody in 40 years. It’s anachronistic and therefore odd. It sounds like somebody who’s not cool but who’s trying to be—desperately and clumsily, like a 70-year-old woman with long, bleached-blonde hair, a barbed-wire tattoo, and a bikini. I’m using the word intentionally, and I’ll come back to the anachronism problem later.

I was much older before I understood the theological and historical roots of this approach. It was rooted in a couple of ideas, one centuries old—oddly enough—and one quite recent at the time.

The first theological basis was post-millennialism, which has been around since at least the 17th century. This view, still popular today, especially in some Reformed circles, is the idea that Christ will return to earth after the church has established the kingdom through centuries of increasing power and influence. Today it’s the basis of Christian Reconstructionism, or Dominion Theology. The view finds its biblical roots most obviously in Jesus’ teaching that the kingdom will arrive slowly; see, for example, the parables of the mustard seed (Mat 13.31-32) and of the leaven (Mat 13.33).

If post-millennialism is correct, then the church needs literally to take over the world, to become its ruler. And if that’s not going to happen by force—I don’t know any post-millennialist who’s advocating force today, despite the fear-mongering from the American political left, which tries to paint all evangelicals as Dominionists, people who want to take over the whole system and impose their beliefs on everyone else—then it needs to happen by influence in every area of life. The church needs to win at everything, in every area of culture.

The second theological basis was a proposal by a leading American evangelical, Harold Ockenga, in the late 1940s. He called for a “new evangelicalism” that would be characterized by 3 distinctives: 1) a rejection of fundamentalist separatism; 2) a commitment to academic engagement with theological liberalism; and 3) a commitment to social involvement. Those who embraced Ockenga’s proposal called for replacing separatism with “infiltration.”

And that in turn opened the door for evangelicals of my generation to try to be groovier than thou.

But as I participated in and observed that strategy, I wasn’t happy with the pragmatics of it. I noticed that we weren’t having much success at attracting long-term disciples with grooviness. They would be more accepting of us—perhaps, if we were groovy enough, and our grooviness didn’t come across as fake and manipulative—but that didn’t seem to translate into their being more accepting of Christ. And I couldn’t help noticing that being groovy affected us, our thinking and our behavior, a lot more than it affected the people we were trying to reach.

I wasn’t happy with the theology of it either. I knew that salvation is God’s work, not ours—from beginning to end. I knew that justification and glorification are entirely God’s work; and I knew that sanctification, which occurs between those two, while something we play a part in bringing to pass, is empowered, enabled, by the Spirit of God.

And so I knew that the very beginning of that process, conviction, is the Spirit’s work as well. It’s not my clever turn of phrase, or my quickness with exactly the right answer to the doubter’s question, or my overpowering intellectual brilliance, or my grooviness—or even Jesus’ grooviness—that brings the unbeliever to Christ; it’s the power of the Spirit, using the living Word of God (Heb 4.12), that confounds the doubter’s resistance from the inside out (John 6.44).

So. I don’t have to be groovy. In fact, since what’s groovy changes as quickly as the word used to describe it—cool, hip, rad, awesome, whatever—I’m going to waste a lot of energy trying to keep up with an ever-moving culture (what?! you mean Hanson’s not rad anymore?), energy that would be better invested in simply telling and living the gospel story.

So I’ve quit trying to be groovy—and that’s made my daughters’ lives easier, if nothing else.

And you know what?

There’s great freedom in not carrying the burden of getting the unbeliever to Christ. God will do that. I don’t have to be cool enough, or smart enough, or quick enough to carry it off. All I need to do is live the fruit of the Spirit, and tell the story.

Or, as my friend David Hosaflook says, “Pray, meet people, and tell them about Jesus.”

And, come to think of it, that requires all the energy I’ve ever had.

Photo by Katia Rolon on Unsplash

Pants on Fire

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I guess it’s time to post here something I posted on Facebook back in 2016:

I’ve seen a trend recently that bothers me. I see my FB friends posting things that aren’t true–that are demonstrably, objectively, documented as untrue. When that is pointed out, they respond, “I don’t know whether this is true or not; but I just wanted to get it out there.”

Outspoken believers. Christian teachers. Pastors. Missionaries. People with a long record of devoted, apparently selfless service.

Where to start.

God is truth, and Satan is the father of lies. Believers, who claim to follow God, ought to be really serious about the truth. They ought to care whether something is true or not. And they ought to take 30 seconds to find out whether something is true before they post it. If you don’t,

  • how worthy is a cause that you need falsehood to support?
  • is the truth not powerful enough to get the job done?
  • how will you give account to God for your haphazard approach to things that are important to Him?
  • what kind of an ambassador for God are you being?
  • why should anyone believe anything you say?
  • why would you want to give the enemies of God reason to blaspheme?

Maybe it’s time we take a deep breath, refocus, and reprioritize. In a billion years, this stuff is going to look really foolish.

That was two years ago, just days before the last presidential election. In the meantime, the situation has only gotten worse.

And on and on it goes.

Let that sink in.

And when the lie is pointed out, you get rejoinders that just make it worse:

  • Well, it sounds like something she could have said.
  • Well, snopes.com is just 3 weird people who like Soros. What does that have to do with whether the quotation is true or not? If you don’t like Snopes as a source, how about looking at the 14.9 million—OK, several hundred—other hits on the alleged quotation?
  • Or sadly, there’s no response at all, and the post stays up. Got no evidence; just liked what it said.

And this from people who get really angry when somebody says there’s no such thing as absolute truth.

God is love, and he loves you, even when you say these things. But love for one thing engenders hate for what would destroy it, and God himself tells us that he hates some things (Prov 6.16-19).

And two of those things that he hates (out of just 7 listed here) are “a lying tongue” and “a false witness.” Two out of seven. You just managed to hit more than a quarter of what God hates. Pretty productive post, considering how little thought went into it.

And throughout our culture, as depraved and perverted as it is, most people are still sensitive enough to the image of God in them that they’re going to despise your dishonesty, and they’re not going to believe anything you say ever again.

Even if it’s John 3.16.

So you need to decide whether zinging an eccentric woman from California is more important than carrying out the Great Commission. And if it isn’t, sounds like you have some repenting to do—taking down some posts, and stating your repentance as publically as you posted the lies.

And then, by God’s grace, reveling in his forgiveness (1Jn 1.9), and living the Truth.

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On Beginning Another Academic Year

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Today is the first day back in the office after a summer of activity, rest, and refreshment. Year 24 of teaching. (I was a teaching assistant during my seminary days, and I’ve been teaching fulltime since the fall of 2000.) Every year means refocusing, fine-tuning, tightening both philosophy and technique.

Every faculty member at my institution has expressed a personal philosophy of education, which he includes in his annual portfolio. What follows is mine.

__________

My educational philosophy grows out of two broader, over-arching philosophies: my life mission and the mission of the institution where I serve.

My life mission is to glorify God by edifying His people and helping prepare others to serve Him. It finds its foundation in Paul’s statement to his Corinthian friends: “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all things to the glory of God” (1Cor 10.31; my translation). It finds its specific application in Paul’s words to another group of friends, this time in Ephesus: “[Christ] gave [gifted people to the church] … in order to equip the saints for the work of service, for the building up of the body of Christ” (Eph 4.12). Like my fellow believers, by God’s good plan and providence, I am where I am, and have the gifts that I have, in order to use those gifts to build up members of the body of Christ. There is no greater mission. And as a fringe benefit, God is a good and gracious Master.

By that same providence, I find myself in the corner of the vineyard that calls itself Bob Jones University. By contracting to teach here, I have agreed to its mission, which is to build Christ-like character in students through the medium of liberal arts higher education. That means that I have a dual focus as I teach: to teach my students the Scripture itself, by which God, over the years ahead, will change them from the inside out, to make them more like Christ (Acts 20.32; 2 Cor 3.18); and to give my students the tools to teach themselves and others the ideas of Scripture (which is my subject area), so that they in turn may present it clearly to those who are seeking and may serve other believers with its truths.

That’s a big job, impossible without divine enablement. Thus I need to begin in reliance on God Himself, nurturing my relationship with Him, praying for direction and empowerment each day, recognizing and embracing each day’s circumstances and challenges as divine appointments. Since I will give account to Him one day for my stewardship (Rom 14.12), I need to prepare myself for each day’s responsibilities, first, and in general, by keeping my academic and spiritual qualifications sharp, and then by evaluating carefully each day’s objectives and planning how best to reach them.

Since the same divine appointment has placed each specific group of students before me, I recognize them as the Bible describes them: made in the image of God (Gen 1.26-27), and therefore worthy of my best effort, regardless of their individual academic abilities or personal character flaws. My goal is to meet each student where he is, and to bring him, by God’s grace, as far as I can down the path of Christ-like character and preparation for skillful service. The Scripture also tells me that my students, like me, are broken images, with sinful natures and evil tendencies (Rom 3.23). That means that I have to encourage them to progress down that path even when they are—often—not inclined in that direction. I may use positive motivation, such as encouragement or praise, or I may need to use what the student may view as a more negative experience, such as exhortation, academic penalty, or even careful criticism. While I never assume that students will naturally do the right thing, I try to approach them positively first, resorting to harder measures only as the softer ones prove insufficient.

My classroom technique is an outgrowth of my own nature. (I believe that had I been born two decades later, I would have been diagnosed with ADHD as a child.) As a student, I needed to be interested in what I was seeing in order to engage it. As I teach I am constantly driven to present material that is both at a reachable level and enjoyable. That means that I first need to couch the material in terms that communicate to the students directly and clearly, and then in a way that is engaging and attractive. I use everyday language, and I define useful jargon as I present it. Since my courses typically need to cover a lot of relatively technical material, I find that I have to use lecture predominantly, but I try to make it engaging by using a lot of humor and demonstrating my own interest in the subject. I’ve learned that a light in the eyes goes a long way.

I find that I cannot reach these goals effectively without at least encouraging my students to interact with me beyond the formal classroom environment. I regularly eat lunch with students in the University Dining Common; I hold scheduled office hours each day; I meet each week with a prayer group in the men’s residence halls; and when I pass students in the hallways or out on the campus, I make a point to catch the eye of each one who will look up, and offer a friendly greeting. (When I’m walking, my cell phone is in my pocket, where it belongs.) When I notice that a student has an uncharacteristic look, I’ll seek an opportunity to take him aside and ask if there’s anything I can help with.

God gifts His people to serve Him, and each one has something he can do well. I find that when I’m in the classroom, I am most at ease; that’s where I fit. (Well, or in Africa with a team of students—but that’s teaching too.) There’s nothing else I would rather do; I don’t talk about “hump day” or yearn for the weekend, and I don’t eagerly count the days until I retire. By God’s grace, I’d like to die with my boots on—teach the last class, deliver the last lecture, turn in my grades, and step through to God’s plan on the other side.

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