the cost of discipleship

A dear friend of mine caused me to return to a book I had begun but had let languish, overcome by events and general busyness, since our vacation in late September: Eric Metaxas' Bonhoeffer—Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. As soon as I picked it back up I was hooked all over again. Metaxas' writing is like butter on warm cornbread, and Bonhoeffer's life is absolutely fascinating.

The tome is daunting, 542 pages exclusive of photos, endnotes, bibliography and author's bio. Yet every time I pick it up I am hard-pressed to put it down. I confess that I have never been much of a biography reader; still, I find that I am blessed I know not how on my journey by studying the lives of others. And Bonhoeffer is strong medicine, indeed.

I bring Metaxas' book up because I have been thinking a lot about truth over the past several weeks, and wondering how we got to such a state as we find ourselves today. As I was reading on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer I was struck by his assessment of the students at Union Theological Seminary,
 and of the mainline Protestant churches in and around New York City when he studied in America in 1930-31. I was astonished to see evidence of the war against truth in his words:

There is no theology here... They talk a blue steak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria. The students... are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are unfamiliar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, laugh at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level (Metaxas, 101).

The theological atmosphere of the Union Theological Seminary is accelerating the process of the secularization of Christianity in America... [and] there is no sound basis on which one can rebuild after demolition. It is carried away with the general collapse (105).

Metaxas writes of Bonhoeffer's observations:

In an attempt to be more sophisticated than the fundamentalists, whom they hated, [professors and students at Union] had jettisoned serious scholarship altogether. They seemed to know what the answer was supposed to be and weren't much concerned with how to get there. They knew only that whatever answer the fundamentalists came up with must be wrong. For Bonhoeffer, this was scandalous (103). 

Bonhoeffer found tepid faith in the churches he visited, with one exception:

Things are not much different in the church. The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events. As long as I've been here, I have heard only one sermon in which you could hear something like a genuine proclamation [of Christ and His atoning work for sin], and that was delivered by a negro (indeed, in general I'm increasingly discovering greater religious power and originality in Negroes). One big question continually attracting my attention in view of these facts is whether one here really can still speak about Christianity... There's no sense to expect the fruits where the Word really is no longer being preached (106).

All this in 1931. This has been going on much longer than I think we imagined. And perhaps it was not new even then, considering the work that needed to be undertaken in the great councils of the early church. The real truth is that the Enemy can't come up with any new lies. Same girl, different red dress.

Let me encourage you to check out Metaxas' Bonhoeffer from your local library, or even purchase it for yours. You will find a great story of a great theologian, as told by a great writer. And you'll love to compare the cover picture with the author's photo on the flyleaf!

more of the truth

I mentioned in my last blog that I was reading A Place For Truth edited by Dallas Willard. This morning I read an essay by Os Guinness entitled Time for Truth. Guinness quotes Solzhenitsyn: "One word of truth outweighs the entire world," and the Charter '77 slogan, "Truth prevails for those who live in truth." Charter '77 was the work of the engineers of the Velvet Revolution (including Vaclav Havel) that overthrew the Communist government of Czechoslovakia in November of 1989.

Guinness contrasts the "impossible" revolution of truth over power with the present "crisis of truth" in Western culture, most particularly in its universities. The kind of truth that overthrew Communism is now considered dead. "At worst, it's socially constructed," says Guinness; "it's a testament to the community that said it and made it stick, and the power they had in expressing it."

Or, to oversimplify perhaps a bit: Truth is relative.

At the risk of letting Os Guinness write my blog, I want to share a fairly good chunk of his essay with you here, because I think it makes for excellent fodder for discussion. Beginning on page 40, he writes:

I want to argue that this crisis of truth is enormously important for both individuals and for the American Republic. Far from being Neanderthal and reactionary, truth is a very precious, simple, fundamental, human gift, without which we cannot negotiate reality and handle life. The truth is absolutely essential for a good human life. Equally important, truth is absolutely essential for freedom. And in the American Republic, where the challenge is not just becoming free but sustaining freedom, any people who would be free and remain free have to grapple seriously with the real challenge of truth.

 Concomitant with the crisis of truth is a crisis of character. Integrity is no longer in vogue; the only ideals are appearance, placement, "product identification." Guinness quotes Mark Twain: "In America, the secret of success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made," and Groucho Marx: "Hey, these are my principles, my moral principles. And if you don't like them, I've got others." If there is no objective truth, then there is no standard on which to build character.

Likewise related is a crisis of ethics. Without truth as an objective reality, evil becomes relative. Guinness bemoans, "I've been on campuses where, to put it simply, today it is worse to judge evil than it is actually to do evil." The moral compass, bereft of truth, simply spins, the needle sweeping across a face with no markings.

These are frightening times; but we are not without recourse, we who believe in a core, central Truth, and the God Who is True. And Guinness encourages followers of Jesus to hang onto that very key idea: we follow God Who is True. When we place faith in this God, we wake up and shake off the nightmare of relativism ("I believe because it is true for me."), subjectivism ("I believe because I feel it deeply.") and pragmatism ("I believe it because it works for me."), and in the light of day believe simply because it is the truth. "The Christian faith is not true because it works; it works because it's true," says Guinness. "Ultimately truth, for both Jews and followers of Jesus, is finally a matter of who God is" [emphasis mine].

When we understand this, we can resist being manipulated by image and power. We can speak truth into relativism without fear of rejection. We can take the risk to ask the relativist to apply his principles universally, including to his own pet theory of the relativity of truth. We can point out the end result of relativistic truth: "If there's no truth and truth is dead, and knowledge is only power, then might makes right. The victory goes to the strong, and the weak go to the wall." But if there is indeed truth, then "truth prevails for those who live in truth."

...and that's a good thing.

what is truth?

I was reading in Acts chapter 17 today about Paul's visit to Athens, and his apologetic for "the unknown god". As I read I wondered if such an approach would work in today's world here in the West. Paul was meeting a culture that, while spiritual, had never encountered Jesus. We, on the other hand, are dealing with a culture that has been pretty well inoculated against Jesus, in no small part due to the efforts of the erstwhile Christian Church to preach a watered-down gospel, lacking in power because it is lacking in discipleship. That, though, is a conversation best left for another post.

In the meantime, as I was trying to imagine a true Mars Hill experience in our present culture, I glanced over at my bookshelf and there saw a book which my bride had bought me entitled A Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life's Hardest Questions,* a compilation of essays from the Veritas Forum,  edited by Dallas Willard. I took it as a theophany, and opened it.

I love the way a new book feels, before the cover gets all curled and the pages all fanned out. I opened the book for the first time and began to read. The Veritas Forum began in 1992 when "a small group of Christians at Harvard hosted the university for a weekend of lectures and discussions exploring some of life's most important questions. Their hope was to restore within the university a space for asking deep questions, seeking real answers and building community around the search for truth" (p. 11). In the intervening years Veritas Forums have taken place at campuses throughout the US and Canada. Willard has compiled some of the best presentations therefrom.

In the opening essay of the book, Richard John Neuhaus declares:

We Christians have an inescapable obligation to contend that there is truth, and that all truths finally serve the one truth. There is one truth because there is one God and one revelation of God in Jesus Christ... It's not only for the sake of the Christian gospel, it's for the sake of our responsibility in our society. It's a socially disastrous, community destroying thing to deny that there is a truth that binds us together—Christian and Jew and Muslim and believer and nonbeliever and atheist and secular and black and white and Asian (28-29).

 So, perhaps we do have an Areopagus, like Paul, where we can proclaim "the unknown god". But how do we go about doing so? Neuhaus cautions,

But we have to demonstrate that we, as Christians, have understood... how Christians claiming to possess the truth can indeed be destructive of public discourse. Christians who are overwhelmingly confident that they actually possess the truth in the sense of being in control of the truth [emphasis mine] can become the enemies of civil discourse (36).

Or, as William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury is reputed to have said, "It's possible to be right repugnantly." If you want a concrete example of this, think of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, and their anti-homosexual-themed picketing of funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq.

I agree with Neuhaus that we who follow Jesus have an obligation and responsibility to declare that there is such a thing as truth. And the only way I see to avoid the pitfall becoming the enemies of civil discourse is to carry on those conversations in the context of relationships forged in our community.

I look forward to reading more of this book. I anticipate it will provide more fodder for this blog!

*InterVarsity Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8308-3845-5

oh no! the de-christmasification process has begun!

I'm hiding out, really. You need to know that my bride is the Queen of Christmas, and it is always like pulling teeth when we get to January 6th—the Epiphany. Because it is then, you see, that all the decor must come down. Susan is always resistant, and we have the annual tug-of-war between my need to not look like a complete idiot to the neighbors (most of whom took their decorations down and threw their trees out on January 2) and her love of Christmastide.

She usually wins, at least for a couple of days.

Today is the 9th, and she is de-christmasifying the house. But she is not particularly happy about it. I know it will take probably 24 hours before I can strip the lights from the tree and get it out, hopefully with a minimum of needle dispersal on the way out the door. I am not certain we are within the time allotted by the city for curbside removal of the dead trees and wreaths... but hope springs eternal.

The biggest reason she so adores the season is that Susan really does get Christmas. It is not just the nostalgic watching of Capra and Crosby. It's not only the eggnog laced liberally with nutmeg, or the "fluffy eggs" Christmas breakfast (which this year we moved to dinner!). It is her deep understanding that God came to rescue her, that the Child in a feed trough is not some sweet and sentimental story, but one filled with blood and earth. It is fierce and tragic, and it is a story of amazing love and sacrifice. It cost God everything to rescue her; and she knows it.

The last of the three gifts the strange astrologers from the East brought to the child Jesus was the gift of myrrh. Myrrh is a fragrant gum resin, and it shows up again some three decades later, when the religious leader Nicodemus brings it to apply to Jesus' tortured and wracked body pulled from the cross and laid in another man's tomb. It was a rush job, because it was approaching the Sabbath when all work must cease.

I have to wonder if His poor mother, seeing the gift Nicodemus brought, remembered the offering which the Magi from Persia carried to Jesus those thirty-some years prior, in a foreshadowing of immense and apocalyptic import.

fact-checking

I spent the middle of the first day of the second decade of the 21st Century with my youngest son, a graduate of Penn State, watching his Nittany Lions play—and, sadly, lose to—the Florida Gators in this year's Outback Bowl. As I watched Joe Paterno and Urban Meyer lead their teams, I reflected on a couple of things about the modern world, here at the start of 2011.

A couple of weeks ago, the internet was buzzing with the sensational news: this would be Joe Pa's last game—that there was uncertainty he would even be well enough to be on the sidelines for the bowl game on New Year's Day. The rumor mill assured us that Joe was ill, that he was suffering from cancer, that at 84, his 37th bowl appearance would be his last. Last week, Joe, the PSU Athletics Department, players and family members alike denied the rumors that Paterno was leaving State, and that he was suffering from ill health.

It occurred to me that rumors of this ilk have, of late, taken on lives of their own. I considered every piece of email I have received screaming that one horrible and dramatic thing or another was immanent, that some bill was about to pass the House of Representatives that would outlaw toenails or force me to sell my grandchildren into slavery or make me give up my right to an opinion... you know the ones I am taking about. And I realized that, just perhaps, this newfound technology of ours which allows us to communicate at the speed of light may have actually outstripped our wisdom to rightly use it.

I remember as a kid watching movies wherein newspaper publishers and reporters (you remember newspapers: those big sheets of grayish paper with print on them that would rub off on your hands) would refuse to print a story until they had checked their facts. Many newspapers and magazines even had a fact-checking desk or department, to assure that what they printed was true and accurate.
But in this day of the 'blog, wherein every guy like me with a dim idea and a desire to say something remarkable can make nonsense available worldwide instantaneously, I think we have subsumed the desire to be accurate to the desire to be first, or if not first, then sensational. Fact-checking has taken a back seat to immediacy, and I think we are dumber for it, because there is no end to what people will believe and pass on as fact. I am reminded of Simone in Ferris Bueller's Economics class, explaining his absence: "My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious."

Is it any wonder, then, that we who claim to have knowledge of The Truth are looked upon with, if not scorn, at least skepticism? We find ourselves in a world where folks who once have been burned by the news flash are twice shy to accept another claim to truth. It is why we need to work so hard to build relationship before we have anything to say. Those we encounter must know us and trust us before they will trust that we have any line on truth. And we need to make sure we are checking our facts.