AnotherThink

The experiment continues

2009-07-04T07:22:39Z

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed... — Preamble to the US Declaration of Independence

The central gripe aired in the Declaration of Independence was that the British Parliament and King George were doing a crummy job governing the American colonies. Since you can't vote a Monarch out of office, the only recourse left to Americans was to "dissolve the political bands which [had] connected them" to Great Britain.

Thus, the War of Independence was fought because a free people wanted to be governed justly, responsibly, and in a manner that served their best interests and expressed wishes. The Declaration of Independence says that a government's raison d'être is to safeguard the rights of the governed, and that it "derives [its] just powers from the consent of the governed."

This is Enlightenment thinking at its best. The American experiment created a government whose principle role was not to serve or preserve itself, but to secure the individual rights and liberty of its citizens.

Our government has become morbidly obese since 1776. At times it seems to have lost sight of that original vision and seems preoccupied with its own interests. Politicians are increasingly drawn to politics because of the perquisites of office instead of the privilege of service. As in the days of King George, government has become increasingly burdensome, and at times seems deaf to the complaints of its citizens.

But as the Declaration wisely points out, "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

We grouse, we complain, we suffer under an increasing weight of high taxes, onerous regulation and unfair treatment by the very government that is supposed to secure our rights. We vote, but little changes.

In such a climate, it would be easy to grow discouraged about the American experiment. But despite legitimate grievances, we must admit that we are blessed by unprecedented freedom and prosperity at a time when many around the world live in fear, often under the thumb of cruel despots. The dream of America is still pure enough to draw thousands of immigrants every year, and few who think seriously about what America means want to live anyplace else.

233 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, America is still a place where its unalienable rights are enjoyed by all.

The American experiment continues and flourishes. May God bless and protect this remarkable Republic, her citizens, and our elected leaders.

Photo credit: Eileen Herrling

Turning lead into gold

2009-06-28T15:30:45Z

I started college as a philosophy major. While my friends were agonizing their way through calculus and organic chemistry, I was happily holed up in the library stacks with musty volumes by Nietzsche, Socrates, Pascal, Descartes, Leibniz, et. al., or in the Student Union having deep conversations with cute girls. All was bliss until it dawned on me that I might someday graduate and have to earn a living, and the only career path open to a philosophy major was teaching philosophy to bored undergrads.

So I got into computers, but I never lost my love for Socrates and the joys of pondering difficult questions.

What I often do here is play at being Socrates. I ask questions, sometimes hard questions, hoping they will help me discover God's truth and my errors. And not my errors only, but the errors of moral judgment, political philosophy and homegrown wisdom that our culture embraces as truth.

I work from several fundamental assumptions: 1) God exists; 2) God is the ultimate arbiter of truth and error; 3) God is relational in character and has revealed himself in history; and 4) God has made it possible for us to gain limited insight into his nature and truth.

There are a number of corollaries to these beliefs, such as "There is only one God, and I am not Him," and "Truth exists, but I am often clueless." I believe each of us has a duty to be inquisitive about who God is and what he wants from us. Too many of us drift through life without examining our deepest beliefs. We're quick to say what we think about the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but about God and the great moral questions of our times we can be strangely, and foolishly, incurious.

I recently stirred up a hornets' nest by comparing the murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's participation in the German plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. I managed to offend equally both the left and the right, so I don't feel too bad.

It was an example of asking questions to discover what I really believe, and to try to discover God's truth. If I ask a lousy question, I muddy the waters. If I ask an unsettling question, I may give offense. I may have done both.

Abortion is a grave sin that robs history of a human life. Any just and moral political philosophy must guard the rights of the weakest members of society, because a majority can tyrannize a minority — slavery and Jim Crow laws being two infamous examples.

If human life is intrinsically deserving of dignity and respect, every assault on human dignity is wrong, including the senseless murder of a child by a gang, the murder of an abortion doctor, euthanasia, capital punishment, genocide, torture, imprisonment on trumped-up charges, pushing mentally ill people out of hospitals and onto the streets, etc., etc.

In my essay, I was trying to find the limits, if any, to a philosophical idea known as utilitarianism, aka "the end justifies the means."

]]> Political systems are deeply utilitarian. And, since abandoning our historic belief in a God who conveys truth, our secular culture has also embraced utilitarianism in the Utopian belief that the moral choice for all is the one creating the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people.

Dr. Tiller's murder was designed to achieve a good end (saving unborn children) by means of an illegal and immoral means: murder.

Many were horrified by the act, but not, interestingly, by the utilitarian ethic that Tiller's assailant practiced. We practice utilitarianism ourselves whenever we break the speed limit to get to work on time, or illegally download a movie or song because we can.

In fact, the US House's vaunted American Clean Energy and Security Act, aka Cap and Tax, is a perfect example of utilitarian thinking. On the theory that government must save us from ourselves by reducing CO2 emissions, the House bill will tax all forms of "non-renewable" energy production and use in order to force a more rapid adoption of "clean" energy. The bill will cost jobs, raise prices, increase taxes, and probably make the US less competitive. In the eyes of Congress and the White House, those are costs worth paying if it means reducing America's carbon footprint.

The end justifies the means.

We may hate what Tiller's murderer did, but we don't disagree with his core end-justifies-the-means idealism — utilitarianism can be quite useful at times!

The Christian faith as lived and preached by Jesus rejects the idea that a wrong act can become right if it results in a useful outcome. At the end of his life, Jesus himself became a victim of that sort of thinking:

[The High Priest Caiaphas justified Jesus' death, saying,] "You don't realize that it's better for you that one man should die for the people than for the whole nation to be destroyed." — John 11:50, NLT

Though innocent, Jesus was unjustly executed to satisfy a mob and prevent a violent backlash by Roman authority.

It is always tempting to make such bargains. We think we are wise enough, powerful enough, even shrewd enough to turn lead into gold, evil into good.

But utilitarianism is a moral shortcut, and moral shortcuts inevitably lead to trouble.

Dr. Tiller's murder was wrong for two reasons: because it took away a human life; and because it was an arrogant grasp for power that rightly belongs to God alone.

Like the alchemists of old, it's so very tempting to think that we just might be able to turn lead into gold. The real sin at play when we justify evil by the good it might achieve is a kind of blind arrogance or hubris that puts us above the law, beyond the law, as long as our intentions are good.

Dr. Tiller's murder forces me to examine my own heart, my own motives, my own conscience for signs of that same sort of god-like hubris. I somehow doubt that I'm the only one who, while condemning his murder, is down in the basement secretly laboring to turn lead into gold.

Photo credit: The Australian Atlas of Minerals Resources

Sunset colors

2009-06-28T05:23:03Z

We had a beautiful sunset this afternoon. I took these two photos within a couple of minutes of each other, as the sun was sinking lower and the sky was darkening. The plant is a yucca.

Blind faith

2009-06-26T15:05:25Z

When a Fail-Safe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe. — John Gall, Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail, 1975.

"I truly believe Metro is a safe system." — DC Metro General Manager John B Catoe, Jr., quoted in the Washington Post.

A "fail-safe" automatic traffic control system designed to make it impossible for DC Metro trains to get too close to each other has failed more than once, this time resulting in 9 deaths. An ultra-modern Air France Airbus, guided by a fail-safe "fly-by-wire" piloting system, experienced multiple, simultaneous failures and fell from the sky into the Atlantic, killing all aboard.

When you consider the millions of passenger-miles safely traveled each year, these incidents really are anomalies. But that's cold comfort to the victims and those who loved them.

Human life is precious, so the impossible goal of these modern technologies is perfection — no deaths, no injuries, no close calls.

Yet, even while standing perfectly still, we are at risk in ways we can hardly imagine. E coli in ground beef and cookie dough. Salmonella in peanuts and pistachios. Melamine in powdered milk.

International trade creates convoluted supply chains with a patchwork of safety standards, leaving the consumer to guess whether the products he uses are safe or dangerous. In a new study by IBM, only 20% of respondents say they trust food safety.

And yet, we have not given up eating.

Life is risky, and technology can't change that. Computerized control systems may eliminate operator errors, but what about the errors made by computer programmers, systems designers and maintenance personnel. Does technology only trade one sort of risk for another?

We hope these systems are safe. Like John Catoe, we want to believe they are safe. But what do we actually know?

It's astounding, and ironic, how much blind faith is required to live in the modern world. Like it or not, technology forces us to put our complete trust in things we do not, and cannot, understand.

We must live by faith or live in paralysis.

]]> Some will reply that when I step into an elevator on the 30th floor of an office building and press Lobby, I am in fact acting out of reason, not faith. Reason tells me that elevators are a proven technology. Reason tells me that the government inspects elevators to make sure they are properly maintained. Reason tells me elevators only plummet to the ground in the movies.

But reason also tells me I am taking a risk. Gravity never relents. Every accident involves the unlikely but deadly convergence of two or three unforeseen events. I may be stepping into an elevator, or into a perfect storm of metal fatigue, poor maintenance and lax government oversight. Reason tells me that when I push that button, I have no way of knowing the outcome.

The writer of Hebrews described faith this way:

Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see. — Hebrews 11:1, NLT

My work requires me to fly quite frequently, which means voluntarily locking myself inside a heavy metal tube that will be hurled at great speed down a runway.

My actions, and the actions of my fellow passengers, testify that we have faith in air transportation. But if I'm honest, I have to admit that I am strapping myself into my seat while knowing absolutely nothing about the pilots, the ground crew, the plane or the controllers who will guide our flight along the way.

I am operating in the blind, perhaps depending on the odds, or a lucky rabbit's foot, or the technological safeguards built into the system.

Like the writer of Hebrews, I have confidence in air travel. Why? I've experienced hundreds of flights, and all have ended well. My faith becomes stronger as I put it into practice, even though I read about the occasional tragic failure of the system and the horrors it can cause.

By comparison, faith in God is much more reasonable.

God has revealed himself and his purposes in the Bible, a book we can read and understand for ourselves. He has revealed himself in history through the life and ministry of his son Jesus, a man whose actions and words have been examined in countless books, and a few movies. God has even revealed himself through Creation, through the earth and all that lives on it, the stars and planets, the natural laws that hold everything together and guide the unfolding of time.

Yet, just like flying, faith in God requires some action on my part. I cannot learn to trust God without first experiencing God and putting myself into his hands. Faith requires time spent pursuing God, experiencing God, time spent speaking with God and listening for God's voice, time spent reading God's Word and using my mind to evaluate the truths it claims to possess. Faith in God requires action, and some persistence.

Now faith... is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. — C S Lewis, Mere Christianity

Ridership on the DC Metro system is already back to normal. Despite that terrible accident, people want to believe, along with John Catoe, that the system is safe. They may be frightened, but they believe, they pay their fares and they act on their beliefs by stepping back onto the train.

And so it is with God. He has already made himself known. He claims (Deuteronomy 4:29) that if we search for him wholeheartedly, we will find him. He waits for us to step forward, pay our fare and put him to the test.

Photo credit: Associated Press

The ethics of murder

2009-06-02T15:23:21Z

After years spent openly opposing Adolf Hitler and encouraging Germans to turn against his regime, Dietrich Bonhoeffer — a Christian minister, theologian, pacifist and German citizen — made a deliberate turn from civil disobedience to secret participation in a cabal whose aim was to assassinate the Fuhrer. Bonhoeffer laid aside his Christian pacifism when he woke up to the fact that Hitler was engaging in genocide. This outraged Bonhoeffer, who held the deep religious conviction that the Jews were a people precious to God and deserving of protection, whatever the personal cost.

As a pacifist, Bonhoeffer had quietly refused to join the military. With his newfound commitment to Hitler's murder he changed direction and joined the German Abwehr, the wartime intelligence agency headed by Admiral Wilheim Canaris. Canaris was secretly opposed to Hitler and was using Abwehr to launch a variety of plots against the Reich, including assassination attempts. Bonhoeffer never participated directly in such plots — they had to be carried out by the military, because officers were the only ones who could get close enough to the Fuhrer to kill him. Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer aided and encouraged these plots from his post inside the Abwehr. Pretending to be a loyal servant of Hitler's Reich, Bonhoeffer was in fact a double agent working towards Hitler's forcible overthrow.

The July 20 Plot on Hitler's life is retold in Tom Cruise's recent film Valkyrie, the plot's code name. It came very close to succeeding but nevertheless failed, enraging Hitler and setting off a ruthless hunt for the conspirators.

Bonhoeffer never claimed that God was "on his side" in this effort. On the contrary, he wrote that his decision to work for Hitler's assassination would make him guilty of breaking God's law. His conviction was that he had to follow the dictates of his conscience, even though he felt certain that he would be judged guilty by God should he cause Hitler's death. His only moral hope, he believed, was that he might find grace to cover his sin through his faith in Christ.

His position seems at first glance to be a tortured ethical contradiction. What drove Bonhoeffer to discard his pacifism in this instance was the realization that in a world broken by sin and suffused by evil, certain horrors simply could not be tolerated, and could only be stopped through violence.

Bonhoeffer saw himself obeying the call of Christ to lay down his life for others. He in effect sacrificed his own moral convictions in the hope of saving Jews from the death camps.

The question I would pose is this: Is it legitimate to suggest that there is a moral equivalency between Dietrich Bonhoeffer's violent opposition to Adolf Hitler and the recent cold-blooded assassination of doctor George Tiller, the unapologetic abortionist? I believe there is.

Put another way, was Bonhoeffer wrong to attempt to save Jewish lives through assassination? Is violence intrinsically evil, as many in these post-modern times believe, or is it possible that violence is morally neutral, neither good nor bad apart from the circumstances in which it is wielded?

]]> Pro-life supporters are not blind to the fact that the moral authority of the US government is being used to legitimize and finance the killing of approximately 1.4 million unborn children annually. Dr. Tiller, an enthusiastic proponent of legalized abortion, was actively engaged in the most horrific of those procedures, the vivisection of late-term babies who were often old enough to survive outside of the womb, had they been given a chance.

For decades, the abortion debate has raged in the political sphere while the death toll has hardly budged. That is because, as our current president deftly demonstrates, the pro-abortion forces have learned to talk in mock-serious tones about the troubling moral dilemmas abortion poses, without actually taking any steps to change the status quo. In fact, despite his alleged desire to reduce the frequency of abortion, President Obama recently lifted the Mexico City Policy, signaling his administration's readiness to extend US financed abortion services to third-world nations.

Meanwhile, the courts have systematically stripped every meaningful attempt by states to permit compromises aimed at reducing the death toll. In an environment where abortion opponents have no legal or political recourse, and where abortion on demand has become the settled policy of the government, what are men and women of conscience to do with their moral outrage?

Many, like me, have leaned heavily on prayer and the hope that a new generation would change its thinking about abortion. The recent movie Juno captures the growing discomfort with abortion among the young, and there is evidence that public opinion is shifting towards the pro-life position.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer went much further. This man, who once considered studying pacifism under Gandhi, instead followed his conscience and joined in a violent scheme to stop the killing of the innocents of his day.

Which is the correct approach for today? In the face of a great evil, what are the limits placed on us by our profession of the Christian faith?

Pro-life organizations are wringing their hands about Dr. Tiller's murder, worrying that it will set back "progress" and stain the good name of Jesus Christ. They are committed to the sanctity of all human life, including the lives of practicing abortion doctors. Violence is never part of God's good plan, some claim, forgetting that Christ's death was itself an act of violence redeemed by God for our good.

The great Christian thinker St. Augustine believed that violence was morally neutral. He was the first to articulate the doctrine of "just war," concluding that great evil should provoke in believers a righteous anger that leads to a restraining of that evil, by force if necessary. He also suggested that a conscience too dull to become angry at evil was morally defective.

For his efforts, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged to death on April 9, 1945, at Flossenburg concentration camp along with a half-dozen other conspirators, including the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilheim Canaris.

Are these times, and the circumstances we find ourselves in, really so different from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's day?

While non-violent, political opposition to evil is always the default position for Christians, the lesson of Bonhoeffer seems to be that there are times when the heart and soul of a government becomes hardened against the prophetic outcry of God's people. At such a time, far more may be required of us. Is this such a time? How far should we be willing to go to stop the killing of the innocents?

Update: Prof. R R Reno at First Things discusses the ethical problem of vigilante violence here.

Julie Bogart has a well-reasoned post on why the Bonhoeffer comparison fails here. (Thanks to Ken at C. Orthodoxy for the link.)

Rick at Brutally Honest compares what I have to say with William Saletan's comments at Slate. Click here for Rick's take.

And, again at First Things, Elizabeth Scalia, aka The Anchoress, asks some hard questions framed around Paul IV's encyclical Humanae Vitae.

Confessing our national guilt

2009-05-26T14:32:45Z

May 26 is National Sorry Day in Australia, a national attempt to heal the wounds of the century-long practice of forcibly removing mixed-race children from their Aboriginal mothers. This government policy, which was carried out for about 100 years from 1860 to modern times, is known to have separated more than 100,000 children from their birth families and placed them in government-run institutions. Children brought into such facilities as the Moore River Native Settlement were required to give up their native language and beliefs in an attempt to bring out their allegedly superior white genetic capabilities.

As Australia became more heavily colonized and white Australians pushed the Aborigines away from white settlements, the state governments created programs for the management of the Aboriginal peoples. Frequent contact between the two populations resulted in mixed-race children, some of whom were rejected by Aboriginal communities.

This led to a diverse set of policies in which such "half-caste" children were identified and taken from their families, often with no attempt to document where the children came from. They became popularly-known as the stolen generation, a term that is still quite controversial in Australia, as many hold to the belief that these children were being rescued from dire circumstances.

These government polices, however, were being driven by the social theories of the time, many of which held that whites were intrinsically superior to blacks, and that the Aboriginal communities would eventually die out completely because of their inability to adapt to modernity.

Stealing mixed-race children, therefore, came to be seen as an act of enlightened compassion by white society.

Nations are capable of horrific sin. America's national acceptance of slavery, followed by more than 100 years of institutional racial segregation, is at least as great a sin as Australia's actions towards its Aborigines, or Germany's Holocaust, or the modern-day genocide still taking place in Darfur.

This same false compassion that justified Australians as they ripped families apart is our favorite American justification for the forcible removal of living fetuses from their mothers' wombs. Under the guise of global compassion, our present administration is exporting this sin around the world, euphemistically calling it family planning. It is ironic that a black president would be a champion of this blatantly racist program to reduce the size of families in Africa, and in America's inner cities.

Perhaps America, too, will one day be moved to contrition for the tens of millions of children who were never allowed to marvel at the sunrise or find their rightful place in God's creation. We are presently in the vice-like grip of a national refusal to acknowledge the sanctity of life. I fear it will be a long, long time before America recognizes the callous and sinful arrogance we have practiced towards the unborn.

Photo credit: Benjamin John Doman

The Mozart paradox

2009-05-04T16:18:48Z

...Mozart's early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. ... What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. ... Instead, it's deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft. — David Brooks, Genius: The modern view, NY Times, April 30, 2009

Poor Mozart. It seems he had more in common with Britney Spears than we might ever have imagined. He owed his musical genius to an overbearing stage-father who relentlessly pushed him to achieve. He was not talented, not in the romantic sense of the word, but merely skilled, a technician whose single-minded work ethic drove him farther than his musical contemporaries.

In the eyes of scientific materialism, we are all just clever machines.

Which begs the question, if Mozart's genius lay not in some divine gift but in decades of slavish practice, why are computers such lousy musical composers? Why do machines write such awful poetry? Why can't a computer create something original, and beautiful?

Isn't this mechanistic view of musical giftedness just the old 1,000-monkeys-typing-Shakespeare canard, dressed in hip new clothes?

The trouble with the man-is-machine paradigm, besides the fact that it desperately wants to dismiss the possibility of God, is that it also dismisses the beautiful originality and artistic insight that Mozart, Bach, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Van Gogh, et. al., have given the world.

One reason to doubt the theory that Mozart was just a very hard worker is that his music was not derivative, nor was he merely an incremental improvement over his contemporaries. He was not "new and improved," but wholly original; his music simply had no equal.

Mozart gave the world beauty — a different sort of beauty than it had ever known.

There is a feel-good, everybody-can-be-a-genius egalitarianism behind these new ideas about giftedness, which very much appeals to our desire for fairness and justice. We wish it were true, that all of us could be little Mozarts if we just worked harder.

The educational philosopher Shinichi Suzuki has been misunderstood on this point, I think. Americans saw the remarkable violin performances of his young Suzuki method students and drew the (erroneous) conclusion that little Johnny and Suzie could become child prodigies with lots of early childhood immersion and non-stop practice.

In fact, Suzuki's musical training was never meant to manufacture musical prodigies — his intent was to stimulate children's minds for other types of learning, and to encourage them to become better human beings by immersing them in the beauty of music.

What American audiences saw, however, was a cookie-cutter method for instant musical giftedness.

]]> Suzuki's highly skilled students never made the leap from technical proficiency to art, originality, beauty, or genius, because there really is something more, something that can't be put in to the budding musician if God left it out.

Science wants to de-mystify mystery. Scientific curiosity has unraveled wonders, and society usually benefits when it understands our world more completely.

These days, science dogmatically opposes any extra-materialistic ingredient in the explanation of anything. When faced with a paradox, science reflexively looks for a natural-world explanation.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. ... The paradox is not a concession but a category, an ontological definition which expresses the relation between an existing cognitive spirit and eternal truth. — Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments

Paradox is not a concession but a category. Darwinian evolution would argue that all of us should be more or less equal, except for slight genetic variations that may help or harm our chances for survival.

But we see instead that there are certain rare forms of genius that go far beyond the end of the bell curve. Science wants to explain these outliers. Their existence is a profound evolutionary paradox, because these gifted people have bodies and minds composed of the very same tissues that we all possess — and yet, their common faculties give rise to uncommon abilities.

If we have been created by a Creator God, if we are imago dei — made in the image of God — the Christian view is that we are not machines stamped out on an assembly line.

To claim that these rare and beautiful gifts are merely the result of hard work and determination diminishes their remarkable character. One only needs to listen to Mozart for a little while to realize that he was not merely good, but touched somehow with a divine fire.

Perhaps giftedness is actually a signpost meant to lift our eyes up, so that we will seek out and praise the God who has so wonderfully made us.

(To read more on the modern view of mind as machine, take a look at my essay from 2004 called Are we spiritual machines?)

Photo credit: Itzhak Perlman, University of Florida Performing Arts

The specter of change

2009-04-29T07:33:50Z

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be. — Thomas à Kempis

Too often, it seems the things we wish we could change we cannot, while the things we wish would stay as they are, change. The world is in flux and we're changing right along with it, though not often in ways we might hope for.

I unexpectedly tore the retina in my right eye back in February while on a business trip in Mexico (I wrote about that experience here). The surgery to fix the tear was done expertly, but my vision has not returned to what it was, and probably won't. There are black floaters and wavy distortions now, and an annoying cloud that floats in and out of sight, as though someone has smeared my glasses with grease.

I make my living reading computer screens all day long, so it has been frustrating not being able to read as easily as I once could. Dr. Amy, my friend the optometrist, has helped a great deal by adjusting my glasses to compensate for these changes. I've also made changes to my work space, and I've had to increase the font size on my computer screen.

But I'd rather not have to do any of these things! I don't especially like change, particularly the kind that reminds me that the warranty on my body parts expired a very long time ago.

Today the news has been filled with Arlen Specter's change of political affiliation, from Republican to Democrat. Utah Senator Bob Bennett has probably analyzed Specter's motives correctly:

"In my opinion, this was a purely political decision on his part. He read the polls, came to the conclusion that he could not win a Republican primary, decided he wanted to stay in the Senate and therefore went with the switch." — Deseret News

Specter, on the other hand, claims that it was the Republican party that changed, not him. Arlen Specter has always been what we used to call a "country club Republican," someone who supported Republican fiscal (read: tax) policies, a strong national defense, law and order, etc., but never had much use for the party's conservative social agenda, especially its stance on abortion.

And he's right that the Republican party has changed in the nearly 30 years he has been a US Senator. The Democrats of John Kennedy's era were fiscal moderates who favored cutting taxes to stimulate jobs growth. Political parties change, and so do politicians. Just a few years back, Arlen Specter wanted to ban Congressmen from changing their party in the middle of a term. That was then...

Arlen Specter isn't much different from the rest of us in that respect. We're all of us apt to change our opinions and loyalties when it suits us.

]]> A new study by the respected Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, titled Changes in Religious Affiliation in the US, examines the phenomenon of Americans changing their religious beliefs and practices from the faith, or non-faith, they were raised with.

The study finds that 44% of Americans no longer belong to the faith of their childhood. It gets a bit tricky, of course, because about 1/3 of that number involve Protestants moving to a different denomination in Protestantism. But the numbers do show what we know already about America, that we are a restless people who find it difficult to sit still.

According to the survey, 11% of Americans raised in either the Catholic or Protestant church are now unaffiliated with any religious faith, whereas only 4% went the other way. Pew also found that Catholics left their faith in higher numbers than others.

About 3/4's of those who change faiths do so by the age of 24, which isn't surprising. Young adults do a host of things intended to proclaim their emancipation from parents, very often making a point of rejecting the values and norms they grew up with. They want to think for themselves, decide for themselves, live as they see fit. Colleges often aid in this, by encouraging young people to challenge the beliefs of their parents.

Pew also discovered that the large majority of those changing faiths don't do so for trivial reasons. It's not that they are unhappy with the pastor or the music or the color of the carpeting. Unlike Arlen Specter, most people place responsibility on themselves, saying that their churches had stayed the same while their own personal beliefs about God and faith had changed over time.

They talk about drifting away, about their spiritual needs not being met, or no longer believing the things they once did. As their own values change, they become dissatisfied with the teachings of the church, and so they search for a faith that is more compatible with their new beliefs.

Jesus seems to have preached change at every opportunity. He appears to have delighted in shaking things up. He challenged his listeners to take difficult steps, to make great sacrifices, for instance, telling the rich young man to sell all he owned before joining Jesus' band of disciples.

He famously challenged Nicodemus to be born again if he wanted to have a part in Jesus' Kingdom:

"I tell you the truth, unless you are born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God."

"What do You mean?" exclaimed Nicodemus. "How can an old man go back into his mother's womb and be born again?"

Jesus replied, "I assure you, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit. Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives birth to spiritual life. So don't be surprised when I say, 'You must be born again.' The wind blows wherever it wants. Just as you can hear the wind but can't tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can't explain how people are born of the Spirit."

"How are these things possible?" Nicodemus asked. — John 3:3-9, NLT

Nicodemus wants a different message from Jesus, but Jesus isn't budging. Thomas à Kempis was right that in some ways, we can't easily change ourselves. Jesus claimed that we can be changed, but only by undergoing a transformation of our innermost spirit carried out by a work of God's Spirit.

The truth is, we do change, whether we want to admit it or not. We do change, but the message of the church has stayed the same for two thousand years. And the things we want to change the most — learning patience with our children, getting along with a difficult boss, learning moderation and self-control in the face of oppressive addictions — these are the sorts of things that seem out of reach, beyond our powers.

We often get stuck in a very uncomfortable place, not really liking what and where we are, but not much liking where God wants to take us, either.

And so, we cut our ties and move on.

We opt for a change of scenery, hoping a new place, a new church, a new group of friends will distract us from the fact that we're the one, the one in need of change. You must be born again, said Jesus, and like Nicodemus, we're puzzled, and we wish he would say something different.

Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

A game-changing breakthrough in stem cells

2009-04-24T05:07:04Z

It's like finding a way to turn water into gasoline, or recycled paper into gold.

Under the headline Major Breakthrough in Generating Safer, Therapeutic Stem Cells from Adult Cells, Science Daily reports that researchers at Scripps Research Institution have perfected a technique for transforming ordinary stem cells into the functional equivalent of embryonic stem cells.

"We are very excited about this breakthrough in generating embryonic-like cells from fibroblasts [cells that give rise to connective tissue] without using any genetic material," says Scripps Research Associate Professor Sheng Ding, who led the research. "Scientists have been dreaming about this for years."

Translation?

This is the next big step, a huge improvement, on research announced in November, 2007, from Japan and the University of Wisconsin (I wrote about it here), in which ordinary adult cells were successfully transformed into pluripotent cells.

A pluripotent cell has the ability to grow into any of the human body's special cell-types. For decades, science has believed that this miraculous quality of pluripotency could only come from embryonic stem cells. It's those embryonic stem cells that morph into the special cells that become our heart, lungs, nerves, muscles, etc.

But embryos are not just blobs of tissue, they are human life at its earliest stage of development. The only way to harvest those magical stem cells is to kill the embryo.

Ethical concerns about experimenting on human life, and the scarcity of embryos in the first place, led a number of researchers to look for ways to avoid using them at all. They wondered if you might somehow turn back the clock on ordinary cells and revert them from single-purpose cells back to pluripotent cells. The answer turned out to be a big yes, but the technique had problems.

That's because it required implanting four genes into the cell, creating a risk that the cells might harm a human patient receiving the cells in a treatment.

This newest technique solves that problem nicely. Once researchers knew that you could turn back the clock on an ordinary cell, they became convinced that there must be other ways to get it done. By doggedly trying various approaches, the Scripps Research team discovered a combination of proteins that worked as well as the former gene-implant technique, but without the risks.

]]> The scientists found that those reprogrammed embryonic-like cells (dubbed "protein-induced pluripotent stem cells" or "piPS cells") from fibroblasts behave indistinguishably from classic embryonic stem cells in their molecular and functional features, including differentiation into various cell types, such as beating cardiac muscle cells, neurons, and pancreatic cells. — Major Breakthrough in Generating Safer, Therapeutic Stem Cells from Adult Cells, Science Daily

Science is always slow and careful, sometimes advancing more slowly than we would like it to. But it does advance. Just weeks after the Obama administration removed all restrictions on embryonic stem cell experimentation, science once again moved the football and made that morally-dangerous decision completely unnecessary.

It is not well known that there are many dozens of successful medical treatments today that are based on the use of adult stem cells, those common cells found in our skin and other bodily tissues. They are not pluripotent, but they are capable of treating a variety of diseases, including cancers of the brain, retina, ovaries, many lymphomas, auto-immune diseases and others.

Embryonic stem cells, by comparison, have yet to produce even a single treatment or cure. Their very pluripotency makes them like loaded guns, and keeping them from shooting the wrong target and killing the patient has been a major problem.

Induced pluripotent cells — the breakthrough reported today — are still potentially dangerous to patients. But this new technique gives these cells some significant advantages over "genuine" embryonic cells.

First, they are abundant, since they come from the most common cells in our bodies. That gives researchers lots of material on which to experiment and learn. Human embryos that might be available for experimentation are in very short supply.

Second, there is no ethical dilemma posed by their use — we can gain the benefits of these powerful, pluripotent cells without destroying human life.

The White House got impatient and jumped the gun. They bowed to the pressure groups and opened up a Pandora's box of ethical problems by lifting the Bush administration's restrictions on embryonic experimentation. Keep in mind that these newest research breakthroughs took place during a time when the Bush administration limited the use of embryonic cells for experimentation. Science didn't stop; it found a better way, a way that we can now pursue in good conscience, a way that has made embryonic experimentation unnecessary, even obsolete.

Let's hope the President's science advisers realize the mistake they have made. This is a game-changing event. It is immoral to harvest body parts from human embryos to serve the health needs of human adults, and now, we have no excuses. Let's put this genie back in the bottle before it's too late.

The politics of beauty

2009-04-22T07:11:15Z

My interest in beauty pageants probably peaked when I was 15. These days, the closest I get is laughing at Sandra Bullock's send-up of beauty contests (scholarship programs!) in Miss Congeniality.

But I have been fascinated by the controversy over this weekend's Miss USA pageant, caused when Perez Hilton, a gay pageant judge, asked Miss California (Carrie Prejean) her opinion of same sex marriage, and poor Carrie had the temerity to ignore the cue cards and think for herself!

Her brief remarks have created a firestorm. After the show, an incensed Mr. Perez went on YouTube and called Prejean a "dumb b-ch" who gave the "worst pageant answer ever." A California pageant official has accused her of lacking compassion. You be the judge:

Perez Hilton, pageant judge: "Vermont recently became the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage. Do you think every state should follow suit? Why or why not?"

Miss California, Carrie Prejean: "I think it's great Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody there, but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be — between a man and a woman." — transcript from Catholic Online

Pretty raw words for a beauty pageant. Alicia Jacobs, a former Miss Nevada and pageant judge, talks about her own shock and disgust in a blog entry she called Pretty is as pretty does:

I was STUNNED on several levels. First, how could this young woman NOT know her audience and judges? Let's not forget that the person asking the question is an openly gay man, at least 2 people on the judges panel are openly gay. Another judge has a sister in a gay marriage. ... Did I mention I was STUNNED? I was also personally insulted & hurt. Prejean's words hit very close to home for me. Some of the most important people in my life, happen to be gay.

Oh, the humanity! Alas, there were too many hurt feelings, and Miss Prejean's answer eliminated her from the race for the crown.

I think it's interesting to compare Carrie Prejean's answer to a similar performance back in August. A young man in a beauty contest had been asked to submit to questioning in a similarly hostile environment. Do you remember? It took place at Pastor Rick Warren's Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency, on the night of August 16, 2008.

Here's what happened:

Rev. Warren: "Define marriage."

Sen. Obama: "I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it's also a sacred union. You know, God's in the mix."

Rev. Warren: "Would you support a constitutional amendment with that definition?"

Sen. Obama: "No, I would not."

Rev. Warren: "Why not?"

Sen. Obama: "Because historically, we have not defined marriage in our Constitution. ... I am not somebody who promotes same-sex marriage, but I do believe in civil unions." — Chicago Sun-Times blog

I've been parsing those two statements, Prejean's and Obama's, for quite some time, and I confess I don't see a hair's breadth of difference between them.

Despite the STUNNING callousness of his answer that night, and the young man's obvious lack of compassion for the gay community, Mr. Illinois somehow managed to win the crown.

Of the two, Prejean's reply took a good deal more courage. She was being questioned by a gay judge and a gay-friendly jury, after all. She surely knew that the response of her heart was not the answer this audience was looking for.

Obama, on the other hand, was speaking before a largely conservative audience in an evangelical church when he endorsed the traditional view of marriage. How hard was that?

]]> I am inclined to think that Obama got a pass on this insult to his friends on the left precisely because they are his friends, and as such, they could be counted on to know when he was being honest, and when he was just being a good politician, saying what he needed to say to get elected.

The anger focused on Prejean, on the other hand, comes from the realization that she was very likely telling the truth about what she thinks, a truth many find offensive.

It's an interesting and instructive cultural moment, one of those 'ah-hah' moments when the curtain gets yanked aside and we get a quick glimpse of the Wizard back there, desperately trying to make himself look great and powerful by yanking levers and turning valves.

Mr. Perez's question was clearly intended to co-opt the pageant for his political ends. Jumping on the stage and shouting slogans would have accomplished the same thing, but far better if he could put his words into the mouths of some bright and beautiful young women. He is not dumb; he knew quite well that these contestants wanted desperately to look good in front of the judges and could be counted on to give the right sort of answers. Wink and nod.

Perhaps the Miss USA pageant itself, in selecting him as a judge in the first place, was announcing its willingness to have its little scholarship program co-opted by the cultural left.

None of them apparently considered the possibility that, hidden among all those plastic smiles, there might be one contestant with a mind of her own, and the backbone to say what she really thought.

They won't let that happen again.

Photo credit: San Diego Christian College

Just give us a straight answer

2009-04-20T01:16:07Z

Jesus never gives a straight answer. Tell us, his enemies demand, Are you the Christ? Frequently, He refuses to answer, and when He gives an answer, He says things like "You have said" and "You say that I am." Maddening.

Jesus could have preemptively silenced a century and more of scholarly debate with a simple declarative sentence. Something along the lines of "I am the Christ, the only-begotten Son of God,..."

[Jesus' deliberate indirection] reveals the supreme modesty of a God who creates a world of such magnetic beauty that it can tempt us to idolatry, and then hides Himself away. — Indirection, Peter J Leithart

I was thinking about this over Easter, about the resurrection and how I might have handled it differently if I had been Jesus.

After leaving the tomb, Jesus quietly stole away to Galilee where he later met with his disciples behind closed doors.

I would have gone directly to the Temple and presented myself to the religious leaders as a kind of in-your-face show of force to put them in their place.

In fact, Jesus commanded something like that when he healed the 10 lepers.

And as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us." When he saw them he said to them, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." And as they went they were cleansed. — Luke 17:12-14, NLT

This turns out to be a response to Leviticus 13. By presenting themselves to the priest, these former lepers would be declared clean and reunited with the community of faith.

But Jesus neither needed approval, nor did he seem interested in confronting the ones who had sent him to the cross.

Still, wouldn't it have been better for us today if he announced his resurrection publicly? Wouldn't it have helped to erase the doubts of future generations?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said something interesting about this:

The one consistent witness of all these accounts, as divergent as they are in telling what occurred and was experienced here, is that the Resurrected [Jesus] appeared not to the world, but only to his followers (Acts 10:40ff). Jesus does not present himself to some impartial authority to attest before the world the miracle of his resurrection, thus coercing the world to acknowledge him. ... The world, as it were, sees only the negative, the earthly impression of the divine miracle. It sees the empty tomb. ...

It is the blessing of Jesus Christ that he does not yet reveal himself visibly to the world, for the very moment that happened would be the end and thus the judgment on unbelief. So the Resurrected withdraws from any visible salvaging of his honor before the world. — Meditations on the Cross, "Resurrection," Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Thus, the ambiguity of the empty tomb is in fact a special grace. Had Jesus taken away that ambiguity, our belief in him would have been "coerced," to use Bonhoeffer's term. Why is that?

If the sovereign Creator reveals himself to us unambiguously, we creatures lose any opportunity to doubt or question of vacillate. Face to face with the Truth, our only choice would be to bow down and worship, or to set ourselves against God. The Sovereign cannot be refused.

Whereas, the parables, the artful dodging in Jesus' words, the negative evidence of the empty tomb, these leave us with some uncertainty about what we may have seen and heard. Uncertainty, in turn, grants us the grace of time to think, to seek him out, to sift the evidence. That very grace of time has made it possible for generations to come to him at their own pace, in their own time.

By choosing not to "[salvage] his honor before the world," as Bonhoeffer puts it, God in Christ Jesus has given the world a very important gift — time, to tell the story of the empty tomb to every generation, to the farthest corners of the earth. Perhaps Jesus' frustrating indirection has given untold millions an opportunity they wouldn't have otherwise had, to seek and find Him.

Illustration credit: Supper at Emmaus, Hendrick Terbrugghen, 1621

One small breath for mankind

2009-04-19T08:44:08Z

With the Obama administration's brave decision to classify carbon dioxide (CO2) as a hazardous pollutant, environmentalists everywhere are troubled and wondering, how can we clean up our very own, air-fouling breath?

What? No one ever told you that your body belches out CO2? It's true! The inconvenient truth is that evolution has let us down in a big way; with every breath we exhale, our lungs are killing the planet! How long can you hold your breath?

Straightforward calculations prove that humans exhale an average of .85 kilograms of CO2 daily. Runners, cyclists and other fitness nuts belch more CO2 in the course of a good workout than your average SUV on the way to Costco. Collectively, our breath pollutes the skies with 6.3 million tons of carbon dioxide daily! As Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

How long can it be before second-hand CO2 bans sweep the nation? How long before joggers become pariahs as they huff and puff themselves, and our planet, to an early death?

How embarrassing that the most conscientious environmentalist, despite buying organic vegetables and riding the bus to work, pollutes the air like a coal-fired electric plant with every shouted slogan!

You can stop this unconscionable gassing, and you can stop it now.

Using technology developed by NASA and perfected on the International Space Station, AnotherThink Industries, LLC, is now offering its exclusive and chic line of personal, CO2-scrubbing respirators to the general public. Our state-of-the-art Bye-Bye CO2 Atmospheric Purifier™ is the very same device worn by President Obama at a recent congressional hearing, where he offered muffled testimony that the average politician exhales 7.8 times more CO2 than a couple of love-struck teenagers necking in the back of daddy's Prius.

And yes, this is the very same respirator recently adopted by the NCAA for use in all college athletics.

Talk is cheap — but now, it's a major cause of global warming, too! So stop yapping and do something! Show you're serious about saving the earth by making your breath fresher than ever, naturally!

For a limited time, the Bye-Bye CO2 Atmospheric Purifier™ is available to environmentally-conscious men and women like you for just five (5) low, monthly payments of $49.99 each, plus shipping and handling. Manufactured from soy beans and recycled milk bottles, these respirators are 100% earth friendly and come in a variety of pleasing earth tone colors — and green, of course!

And, for you pet lovers, ask about our specially-designed respirators for cats and dogs.

Don't delay! Congress might put a cap and trade tax on breathing any day now. So put your money where your potty-mouth is and say bye-bye to CO2 forever with your very own Bye-Bye CO2 Atmospheric Purifier™. Operators are standing by and breathing very shallow breaths.

Photo credits: Charles Dharapak, AP; University of Texas, Arlington

Mission from Africa

2009-04-17T07:27:25Z

For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires. — Hebrews 4:12, NLT

It sometimes seems to me that American Christianity focuses too much on the second half of that verse and not enough on the first.

What I mean is that we seem to approach the Bible therapeutically, as a prescription against bad habits and questionable values. And it is, but it is so much more.

The scriptures are not a pop psychology guide to abundant living. They are the Logos of God, the living, active, powerful and creative mind of God. "The word of God is alive," transforming and redeeming society as it redeems the lives of men and women.

Unfortunately, much of the American church seems oblivious to this powerful Logos. On any given Sunday morning in pews across America, everything seems too carefully programmed for any unauthorized outbreak of the power of God. Three hymns, a prayer, a sermon and we're out the door before the Holy Spirit even notices we were there.

In a fascinating and well-researched article for the New York Times, Andrew Rice has written about the explosive growth of Christianity in the global south, and a particular Nigerian church that has begun an ambitious Mission from Africa on American soil.

The Redeemed Christian Church of God is driven by a vision of the power of God shaking up America's dozing church. They see themselves as a vanguard, preparing the way for a reawakening to the power of God. They are deeply Pentecostal, a faith that I confess has always made me uneasy. Yet, it's a faith that speaks to people who see the need for a God who can overcome the entrenched skepticism and intractable problems of our secular world.

Even by the passionate standards of Africa, the Redeemed are renowned for the intensity of their prayer. In Nigeria, it has been called "the weeping church." During services, members of the congregation will clap, whoop and break into glossolalia — speaking in tongues — which Pentecostals believe to be the verbal expression of the Holy Spirit. They will collapse on the floor, burying their faces in the carpet, and writhe in the throes of divine communion. ...

"I just wasn't getting what I was after spiritually in the Baptist Church," [said Della Faye Sowunmi]. "To watch people praise and worship like that, it touched my heart."

With the ambitious goal of establishing churches in every state, the Redeemed Christian Church has adopted a strategy of dividing their congregations frequently, sending their own members out to plant new churches in new locations. Pastor Enoch Abeboye, the leader of the Redeemed Church Church, explains:

"If it appears as if initially our church is sent to target the immigrants from Africa and so on, it's because you have to start somewhere. But then, later on, the people who are natives of this land will sooner or later come to the realization that they need God, and we will be on the ground when that time comes to present God to them." — Mission from Africa, Andrew Rice, New York Times, April 12, 2009

It is a message church members hear often. Pastor Daniel Ajayi-Adeniran reminded his flock one Sunday of God's command to the Jews in the book of Zechariah to rebuild the destroyed temple in Jerusalem. "We're going to pray for our nation, the United States of America," he said. "This is our Jerusalem!"

A hundred and fifty years ago, American and European Christians took the message of Jesus Christ to Africa. It took hold slowly, at first mixing itself with African animism. But gradually, the Logos reached into hearts and took hold, and as faith in these modern times has gradually faded in Europe, it has grown at exponential rates in Africa, as if placed there on deposit, for safe keeping. Now, a robust and mature African Christian church has turned its eyes to the agnostic mission fields of Europe and America.

Ironic, to say the least. And it seems to me proof that Christianity isn't merely good stories written in a very ancient book, but something much more. It is the Logos of God, moving powerfully, never still, always working to take back the hearts and minds of a new generation.

Photo credit: Church of Nigeria

Reconciling Easter

2009-04-11T03:53:54Z

There is an undeniable sweetness about this season. It's the sweetness of bitter winter transformed into carefree spring, of the flowering of dormant flora and days lengthening after months of oppressive darkness. There is even the sweet spectacle of fidgety children and doting grandparents all hurrying off to church on Easter Sunday.

And while all of these things are good, none of them can be found at the heart of Easter.

Good Friday is not the darkness that necessarily must give way to light. Nor is it the winter sleep or hibernation that stores and nurtures the germ of life. Rather, it is the day when the incarnate God, incarnate love, is killed by human beings who want to become gods themselves. It is the day when the Holy One of God, that is God himself, dies, really dies — of his own will and yet as a result of human guilt, and no germ of life is spared in him such that his death might resemble sleep. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Meditations on the Cross, "Resurrection instead of immortality"

As Bonhoeffer says elsewhere, "That Christ was indeed dead [did not suggest] the possibility of his resurrection, but its impossibility; ... There is absolutely no transition, no continuum between the dead Christ and the resurrected Christ other than God's own freedom to create [something] out of nothing."

The sinless Son was lifted up on a cross, bleeding, in agony, derided, and after hours of painful desperation, he died.

He was pierced with a Roman spear and carried away to a cold tomb. His limbs stiffened with rigor mortis. His skin became pale; his jaw slackened. The cellular walls of his organs turned to mush; his neurons lost their conductivity.

This was not winter waiting sweetly and quietly for spring, but winter suddenly hardened into an ice age, winter made permanent by the violent death of the sun.

Jesus died.

There is nothing sweet about Good Friday, which is why Jesus' followers scattered, grief-stricken and terrified that their heads would be next on the executioner's block.

Yes, there is a glorious resurrection on Easter morning, but I sometimes fear we take it too lightly.

From cold, dead tissue, the Creator of abundant life made a fresh start, rebooting human history while restoring the life of his Son.

Our alienation from God was rooted in millennia of stubborn rebellion. From Eden onward, we were ripped apart from Love. God nailed our rebellion to the cross and reconciled us to himself at the door of an empty tomb.

Art credit: Eugene Delacroix, Christ on the Cross, 1845

Deconstructing Bart Ehrman

2009-04-09T20:14:08Z

Back before cable and the internet, we used to depend on Uncle Walter for news. A consummate professional, CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite could always be relied on to get his facts straight and the questions of the day answered with precision.

Today, the inescapable 24/7 news cycle and the tsunami of information have biased us to think of everything as an experience in journalism, where carefully arranged factoids lead us like Hansel's pebbles back to the truth.

In truth, this materialistic, hard-evidence bias of ours leads to a peculiarly modern way of framing history and the events of the day.

It is impossible to understand the Bible, much less discover the God who is revealed there, by pretending to be journalists asking gotcha questions.

This does not mean we must check our brains at the door of the church. Jesus said the greatest commandment of God is to love him with all of your heart, soul, and mind.

That implies a God who expects us to pursue the truth with intelligence. It also points up one of the ways ancient writers of the scriptures saw the world differently than we do: they believed that every human being has a moral center, the soul, which is capable of responding to God's truth, directing our decisions, and accepting responsibility — eternally — for our moral choices.

The Bible was written by men who were no less intelligent than we are, but who nevertheless saw life very differently than we do. They saw God at the center of everything.

If we claim to want to understand the Bible but are dismissive of the cultural-historical perspectives of its writers, or worse, if we read it through the blue-blocker lenses of our modern biases about truth and human nature, we just won't get it.

In biblical scholarship circles, they speak of a historical critical method of reading Scripture.

[In the historical critical method] ...two of the major things one is taught, quite correctly ... are: 1) ancient historical texts must be studied in their original historical contexts to be properly understood; and 2) modern post-Enlightenment historiography is at odds with the historiography of most ancients, particularly when it comes to the issue of God's involvement in human history.

There is a further corollary — in order to understand the Gospels or Acts, or Paul's letters, or Revelation, one needs to understand the features and characteristics of such ancient literature — in short their respective genres. — Ben Witherington, Bart Interrupted — A detailed analysis of 'Jesus Interrupted', Part One

Prof. Bart Ehrman is an author and student of the Bible who has written two very controversial but popular books about Christianity: Misquoting Jesus: The story behind who changed the Bible and why (2005) and Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the hidden contradictions in the Bible (2009).

In an excellent, two-part analysis at his blog, Prof. Ben Witherington carefully examines Ehrman's arguments and concludes that he has failed to apply the requirements of historical criticism, causing Ehrman's modern biases to lead him astray in his search for biblical truth.

]]> Ehrman's Jesus Interrupted is often wrong and thoroughly misleading. His primary thesis is that there are apparent inconsistencies between the various books of the New Testament about the journalistic facts of what happened to whom, which have created massive distortions about Christianity and a great cover-up aimed at keeping the public in the dark about the truth about Jesus and the modern Christian church.

Serious charges, if they were true.

Prof. Witherington, who is both more widely-published and better-trained than Ehrman in the field of biblical scholarship, has responded to Ehrman's book in great detail here (part 1) and here (part 2).

In an age when the DaVinci Code has been accepted as fact by many, Christians need to familiarize themselves with Ehrman's books and the rebuttals of people, like Ben Witherington and others, who take biblical scholarship seriously.

Not only does Prof. Witherington do a fine job of countering Ehrman's claims, but for people like me whose knowledge of biblical criticism is pretty thin, Witherington's two pieces serve as an excellent introduction to better understand the perspectives of the first-century authors of the New Testament.

I love art and had a chance to see works by many of the great masters on a trip to Paris a few years back. In this excerpt, Witherington uses an example from Claude Monet to explain the disconnect between the Bible's ancient writers and our modern, journalistic biases about what is, and isn't, true:

The Gospels are not, and never were intended to be inspected as if they were ancient photographs of Jesus taken with a high resolution, all seeing lens. On the contrary these documents are much more like portraits, and portraits always are selective, tendentious, perspectival. Let me illustrate this point.

One of my favorite Impressionist painters is Claude Monet, and I really love his series of painting done of Rouen Cathedral. These paintings were done in the late 1890s and they depict the front face of the Cathedral from slightly different angles of incidence, and in different lighting. But in each case it is recognizably the same cathedral with the same basic shape, from the same basic frame of reference.

Let us suppose for a minute then that the Gospels are like these paintings. Now it would be totally pedantic to have an argument that went as follows: "In this painting Monet depicts the color of the front façade of the cathedral as being gray, but in this picture he paints it as being a yellowish shade, and in this picture a pinkish shade. Which is it? Surely one must be right and the other depictions wrong."

Of course the proper response to this silly discourse is that they are all right, because they attempt to depict the appearance of the building at different times of day from slightly different angles. And no art critic in their right mind would think of suggesting that one painting was in error compared to the other. My point is simple. The Gospels are not works of modern biography or historiography and they should not be evaluated by such canons. (emphasis mine) — Ben Witherington, Bart Interrupted: A detailed analysis of 'Jesus Interrupred', Part One

Photo credit: A montage of three of Claude Monet's paintings of the Rouen Cathedral.